1457 Henry VII - English King who founded the Tudor dynasty and brought order after the War of the Roses
1822 Alexander Mackenzie - Canada's second Prime Minister, born in Scotland
1833 General Charles George Gordon - British soldier and Governor of the Sudan who defended Khartoum
1841 Sir Henry Morton Stanley - Welsh born British explorer and journalist who was sent by the New York Herald to lead the African expedition searching for the missing missionary, David Livingstone
1855 William Burroughs - US inventor with little formal education, who invented the first commercially successful adding machine and founded the American Arithmomter Company of St. Louis. The company later became Burroughs Adding Machine Company. His earliest version of the machine, like other adding machines of the time, was accurate but impractical. However, in 1892 he patented a practical adding machine that would become a commercial success
1873 Colette Sidonie-Gabrielle - French author (Chérie, Gigi, The Vagabond, Music-Hall Sidelights) She was born in a small town in Burgundy
1887 Artur Rubinstein - Polish born US virtuoso pianist who gave his first concert at the age of 5, and played solo for the Berlin Symphony at the age of 12
1912 Jackson Pollock - US abstract expressionist painter
1926 Soupy Sales – Comedian and actor (The Soupy Sales Show)
1929 Acker Bilk - British jazz clarinettist, composer (Stranger on the Shore)
1933 Susan Sontag - Author (Against Interpretation, The Volcano Lover: A Romance)
1935 Nicholas Pryor – Actor (Murder at 1600, Executive Decision, Hoffa, The Falcon and the Snowman, Risky Business, Airplane!, The Adams Chronicles)
1936 Alan Alda - Actor (M*A*S*H, Paper Lion, The Four Seasons, Same Time Next Year, California Suite, The West Wing)
1943 John Beck – Actor (Dallas, Sleeper, Flamingo Road, Rollerball, The Other Side of Midnight, The Call of the Wild)
1944 Susan Howard - Actress (Sidewinder One, The Power Within, Dallas)
1945 Karen Lynn Gorney – Actress (Saturday Night Fever, All My Children)
1948 Mikhail Baryshnikov - Russian Bolshoi ballet dancer who defected to US & actor (The Turning Point, That's Dancing, Dancers)
1968 Sarah McLachlan – Canadian singer (Fallen, Answer, I Will Remember You, Building a Mystery, Angel)
1979 Rosamund Pike – British actress (Pride & Prejudice, Johnny English Reborn, Die Another Day, Wives and Daughters, A Rather English Marriage)
1981 Elijah Wood – Actor (The Lord of the Rings, Deep Impact, Oliver Twist, The Good Son, The Adventures of Huck Finn, Radio Flyer, The Witness)
1998 Ariel Winter – Actress (Modern Family, One Missed Call, ER, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang)
Died this Day
814 Charlemagne - Holy Roman Emperor
1547 Henry VIII - King of England, in London. He was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Edward VI
1596 Sir Francis Drake - English navigator. He died of dysentery off the coast of Panama and was buried at sea
1613 Sir Thomas Bodley - British scholar and founder of the Bodleian Library in Oxford
1829 William Burke - Irish body-snatcher who was executed. He worked with William Hare in selling bodies to Dr. Knox, who dissected them for research in medical classes. When the natural supply dried up, Burke and Hare helped it along by committing a string of murders before being caught. Hare had turned King's evidence and was not brought to trial. He lived under an assumed name, but when his identity was discovered, he was attacked and blinded. Hare was last seen alive begging outside the London Museum. Dr. Knox was not even called to give evidence at Burke's trial. Burke was hanged in front of a huge crowd, many of whom paid a premium for a good view. The crowds chanted the rhyme: "Burke's the murderer, Hare's the thief/And Knox the boy who buys the beef"
1908 Sidney Paget, age 37 - British artist who illustrated the Sherlock Holmes stories in The Strand magazine
1918 Dr. John McCrae - Canadian doctor and poet. He wrote the poem In Flanders Fields after seeing a friend die in WWI. The poem is recited in Remembrance Day observances in Canada each November 11th
1922 Nellie Bly, age 55 - US journalist who pioneered investigative journalism. She was famous for her daring exploits and was sent by The World to beat the mark of Phileas Fogg, Jules Verne's hero of "Around the World in Eighty Days". She succeeded, making the tour in 72 days 6 hours 11 minutes. She died of pneumonia
1928 Vicente Blasco Ibàñez, age 60 - Spanish politician and author (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) He died the day before his 61st birthday
1939 William Butler Yeats, age 73 - Irish poet, writer & dramatist (Mosada, The Trembling of the Veil, At The Hawks Well, The Wind Among the Reeds, The Tower, Easter 1916) Yeats was born in Dublin, and moved with his family to London when he was two. They returned to Dublin in 1880, when Yeats was fifteen. His father was a former lawyer turned painter, and Yeats, too, planned to pursue art. He entered the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin after high school but soon left to focus on poetry. His first poems appeared in 1885 in the Dublin University Review. In 1887, Yeats returned to London and became a writer, devoting himself to visionary, mystic poetry. His first book of verse was published in 1889, the same year he fell hopelessly in love with actress Maude Gonne, who refused to marry him. In 1891, he helped found the Rhymers Club, a society of poets. In 1898, he met Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory and spent many subsequent summers at her estate. He later purchased a nearby ruined castle, which he called The Tower, and which figures as an important symbol in his later work. Yeats was persuaded to help launch the Irish National Theatre by Lady Gregory, who was a writer and collector of Irish folklore. Until 1907, Yeats managed the theater's business affairs and wrote numerous plays. On occasion, his experimental works sparked riots in the audience. In 1922, he was appointed a senator of the new Irish Free State, and the following year he won the Nobel Prize. Yeats died in France
1986 Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik, Gregory B. Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe - The seven crew members of the space shuttle Challenger, which exploded 73 seconds after lift-off from Cape Canaveral. One of the crew members, Christa McAuliffe, became the first civilian to be launched into space. She was a 37-year-old New Hampshire schoolteacher who had won a competition that earned her a place among the seven-person crew. President Reagan suspended shuttle flights and appointed a panel to investigate. On June 10th, the commission said the explosion was caused by an escape of gases from faulty O-ring gaskets on a joint on a solid rocket booster. It urged strict new standards to ensure future flight safety. The next shuttle would not fly until the Discovery was launched on September 29, 1988
On this Day
1738 Construction began on London's Westminster Bridge
1807 London's Pall Mall became the first street in the world to be illuminated by gaslight
1855 The Panama Railway dispatched the first train across the Isthmus of Panama, departing from the Atlantic side for the Pacific. In 1847, a group of New York financiers organised the Panama Railroad Company, and in 1850, workers began laying track through Panamanian jungle roughly along the route followed by the present canal.
The railway would go on to carry thousands of unruly gold miners to California via the dense jungles of Central America. The traffic of freight and human beings moving both ways across the isthmus kept the Panama Railway busy until 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad was completed in the US. However, the railway continued to carry a great deal of commercial freight destined for Europe or Asia until the Panama Canal was completed in 1914
1870 The ship the "City of Boston" sailed from Halifax and disappeared with 191 passengers
1878 The first US commercial telephone switchboard went into operation in New Haven, Connecticut, providing eight lines for twenty-one telephones
1896 The first speeding ticket was handed out to a British motorist, Walter Arnold of Kent, for exceeding the 2 mph limit in a built-up area. He was doing 8 mph!
1896 Mrs. Rose Lee was given the first radiation treatment for carcinoma of the breast by Émile Grubbe of Chicago
1902 The Carnegie Institute was established in Washington, DC
1909 The US ended direct control over Cuba
1914 Canadian suffragette leader Nellie McClung staged a mock parliament in which men had to ask women for the right to vote. Two years later, Manitoba became the first province to give women the right to vote
1916 Manitoba became the first Canadian province to grant women the right to vote
1917 The US ended its search for Pancho Villa, recalling US forces from Mexico after nearly 11 months of fruitless searching for the Mexican revolutionary who was accused of leading a bloody raid against Columbus, New Mexico
1980 Canadian diplomats daringly smuggled six Americans out of Tehran in what became known as the Canadian Caper. Canadian embassy officials in Tehran had hidden six Americans from Iranian militants for more than two months after the US embassy was seized by Iranian revolutionaries. The six escaped Iran using Canadian passports. Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor left a few hours later, after closing the Canadian embassy. Taylor received the US Congressional Medal of Honor and thousands of other gifts in an outpouring of US gratitude
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