1627 Robert Boyle - Irish physicist and chemist who formulated Boyle's Law which relates to the pressure and temperature of gasses
1736 Joseph Louis LaGrange - French mathematician and physicist who chaired the commission in 1793 that introduced the metric system
1759 Robert Burns - Scotland's national poet (Tam 'O Shanter, To a Mouse, Auld Lang Syne, The Cotter's Saturday Night, Halloween, A Red Rose) Across the English-speaking world, Burns fans celebrate his birth with high-spirited "Robbie Burns Night" feasts, featuring haggis and other Scottish delicacies, as well as enthusiastic drinking, toasting, speechmaking and bagpipes. Burns, the son of a poor farmer, received little formal schooling but read extensively. A restless, dissatisfied spirit, he fell in love with a young woman named Jean Armour in the mid-1780s but refused to marry her when she became pregnant. The pair endured a legal struggle, at the end of which the courts declared Burns legally single – but he later married Armour anyway. Eventually, the couple had nine children, the last one born on the day of Burns' funeral. He published his first poetry collection in the Scottish Dialect in 1796, and he quickly became the darling of elite Edinburgh intellectuals. "Oh wad some power the giftie gie us, To see oursels as others see us!"
1812 William Shanks - British mathematician who spent numerous years manually calculating the value of pi. Shanks kept a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring in a coal mining area near Durham. His calulation of pi reached 707 places by 1873, a feat unchallenged until the use of electronic computers. In 1944, Ferguson's new computation of pi showed Shanks had made a mistake in the 528th decimal place, invalidating the digits calculated beyond. By the end of the twentieth century, computers could easily extend the results to over 2 billion places
1874 William Somerset Maugham - Paris-born British author and playwright (Of Human Bondage, Cakes and Ale, The Razor's Edge, Liza of Lambeth, Jack Straw, The Tenth Man)
1882 Virginia Woolf - British novelist (To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Three Guineas)
1919 Edwin Newman - US journalist and author (NBC News, PBS, Comet, A Civil Tongue)
1931 Dean Jones - Actor (The Love Bug, Tea and Sympathy, Beethoven, A Clear and Present Danger)
1936 Diana Hyland - Actress (One Man's Way, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, Eight is Enough)
1938 Etta James - Blues singer (At Last, Good Rockin' Daddy, All I Could Do Was Cry, Pay Back, Tell Mama)
1939 Angela Thorne – British actress (To the Manor Born, Noah’s Ark, Cold Comfort Farm, Three Up Two Down, Mistral's Daughter, Bullshot, Emmerdale Farm, Elizabeth R, Wallander: The Man Who Smiled) She is the mother of actor Rupert Penry-Jones
1941 Gregory Sierra – Actor (Barney Miller, Jane Austen's Mafia!, Hot Shots! Part Deux, Soap, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Towering Inferno, Papillon, Sanford and Son)
1945 Leigh Taylor-Young - Actress (I Love You Alice B. Toklas, Soylent Green, Can't Stop the Music, Honeymoon Academy, Peyton Place)
1950 John Terry – Actor (Full Metal Jacket, Lost, Zodiac, Into the West, 24, Of Mice and Men, The Living Daylights)
1958 Dinah Manoff – Actress (Soap, Empty Nest, Ordinary People, Grease, Raid on Entebbe, Maid for Each Other)
Died this Day
1627 Louis Hebert - Canada's first doctor. He died in Québec City
1855 Dorothy Wordsworth - British author (Alfoxden Journal) She was the sister of poet William Wordsworth, and published many journals of their travels together
1868 Alexander R. Dunn, age 34 - Canadian soldier, who was the first ever Canadian to be awarded the Victoria Cross. He was killed in a hunting accident in Abyssinia. Dunn received the Victoria Cross for his bravery in the Crimean War, as a Lieutenant in the 11th Hussars, during the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. Dunn was part of an English brigade of 600 men who charged the Russian army at 11 am. Unhorsed, he emptied his revolver at the Russians, then used his sword, which was too long by regulation standards, to save several of his fellow cavalrymen. He later helped organise the 100th Regiment of Foot in Canada, and served as its CO in Gibraltar
1947 Al Capone - US gangster. He died in Miami Beach, Florida of a brain haemorrhage, a week after his 48th birthday
1969 Irene Castle - US dancer who, with her husband Vernon, created The Turkey Trot and The Cake Walk
1990 Ava Gardner, age 67 - US actress (The Snows of Kilimanjaro, On the Beach, The Sun Also Rises, The Cassandra Crossing, Show Boat) She died in London, of pneumonia
On this Day
1533 England's King Henry VIII secretly married his second wife, Anne Boleyn who later gave birth to Elizabeth I
1579 The Treaty of Utrecht was signed, marking the beginning of the Dutch Republic
1791 The British Parliament approved a bill splitting the old province of Québec into Upper and Lower Canada. Upper Canada later became the province of Ontario, while Lower Canada became Québec
1890 US reporter Nellie Bly of the New York World returned home, completing an around-the-world journey in 72 days, six hours and 11 minutes. She had beaten the fictional 80-day trip of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg
1924 The first Winter Olympics were held at Chamonix in the French Alps. Spectators were thrilled by the ski jump and bobsled as well as 12 other events involving a total of six sports. The International Winter Sports Week, as it was known, was a great success, and in 1928 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially designated the Winter Games, staged in St. Moritz, Switzerland, as the second Winter Olympics. Five years after the birth of the modern Olympics in 1896, the first organised international competition involving winter sports was staged in Sweden. Called the Nordic Games, only Scandinavian countries competed. Like the Olympics, it was staged thereon every four years but always in Sweden. In 1908, figure skating made its way into the Summer Olympics in London, though it was not actually held until October, some three months after the other events were over. In 1911, the IOC proposed the staging of a separate winter competition for the 1912 Stockholm Games, but Sweden, wanting to protect the popularity of the Nordic Games, declined. Germany planned a Winter Olympics to precede the 1916 Berlin Summer Games, but World War I forced the cancellation of both. At the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, ice hockey joined figure skating as an official Olympic event, and Canada took home the first of many hockey gold medals. Soon after, an agreement was reached with Scandinavians to stage the IOC-sanctioned International Winter Sports Week in Chamonix, in January 1924. It was so popular among the 16 participating nations that, in 1925, the IOC formally created the Winter Olympics, retroactively making Chamonix the first. In Chamonix, Scandinavians dominated the speed rinks and slopes, and Norway won the unofficial team competition with 17 medals. The US came in third, winning its only gold medal with Charles Jewtraw's victory in the 500-meter speed-skating event. Canada won another hockey gold, scoring 110 goals and allowing just three goals in five games. Of the nearly 300 athletes, only 13 were women, and they only competed in the figure-skating events. Austria won the pairs competition and the women's singles in figureskating. The Olympics offered a particular boost to skiing, a sport that would make enormous strides within the next decade. At Chamonix, Norway won all but one of the nine skiing medals
1955 Columbia University scientists developed an atomic clock accurate to within one second in 300 years
1959 American Airlines opened the jet age in the US with the first scheduled transcontinental flight of a Boeing 707
1971 Charles Manson and three female followers were convicted in Los Angeles of murder and conspiracy in the 1969 slayings of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate
1978 Four women in Dubuque, Iowa, bucking mind-boggling odds, were dealt perfect bridge hands in the same game, allowing that spades is the true perfect hand
1981 The 52 Americans held hostage by Iran for 444 days arrived in the US
1989 British actor John Cleese won libel damages at Britain's High Court over an article in the Daily Mirror which claimed he had become like Basil Fawlty
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