1737 Thomas Paine - US revolutionary leader, political philosopher and author (Common Sense, The Age of Reason, The Crisis: "These are the times that try men's souls")
1843 William McKinley - 25th US President, who was assassinated while in office
1850 Lawrence Hargrave - Australian aeronautical pioneer best known for his invention of the box kite. Hargrave "flew" on November 12th, 1894, by attaching himself to a huge four kite construction attached to the ground by piano wire. Due to their abilities to carry heavy payloads, steady flight, and capacity for high altitude flight, these kites have had many industrial and military uses in the past. Box kites were used until the 1930's to carry meteorological equipment for high altitude weather studies and by the Royal Air Force as sea rescue equipment to deliver radio aerials
1867 Vicente Blasco Ibàñez - Spanish politician and author (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse)
1874 John D. Rockefeller, Jr - US industrialist who was the founder of Standard Oil Company and the Rockefeller Foundation
1880 W.C. Fields - US comedian who claimed he wouldn't act with children or animals (My Little Chickadee, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break)
1885 Huddie Ledbetter - US singer better known as Leadbelly (The Rock Island Line, The Midnight Special, Goodnight Irene)
1901 Allen Du Mont - US engineer who perfected the cathode-ray tube and manufactured the first commercially available television sets. The early cathode ray tubes were imported from Germany at high cost, but they burned out after 25 or 30 hours. In the 1930's, he simplified and improved the production of cathode ray tubes which lasted a thousand hours, and in 1937, he offered his television receivers for sale. After WW II, Du Mont had become the industry's first millionaire, investing also in broadcasting stations. The Du Mont Broadcasting Co. he began in 1955 grew to become Metromedia, Inc. Du Mont helped formulate broadcast standards for black and white and colour television, and he worked with the FCC to allocate frequencies for television channels
1915 Victor Mature - Actor (The Robe, Samson and Delilah, The Las Vegas Story, Song of the Islands, After the Fox)
1918 John Forsythe - Actor (Bachelor Father, Charlie's Angels, Dynasty, And Justice for All, Scrooged)
1923 Paddy Chayefsky - US playwright (Marty, Paint Your Wagon, Altered States, Network)
1940 Katharine Ross - Actress (The Graduate, The Final Countdown, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Singing Nun)
1942 Claudine Longet - Singer, actress (The Party, McHale’s Navy) She was at one time married to Andy Williams. She also shot her boyfriend Spider Sabitch to death
1945 Tom Selleck - Actor (Magnum PI, Jesse Stone Mysteries, Blue Bloods, Stone Cold, Three Men and a Baby, Mr. Baseball, Runaway, Lassiter, Quigley Down Under, In & Out, Coma, The Young & the Restless, Las Vegas)
1950 Ann Jillian - Actress (It's a Living, Mae West, Mr. Mom, Hazel) She played Suzanne in the Perry Mason movie The Case of the Murdered Madam
1954 Oprah Winfrey - Talk show host and actress (The Color Purple, Native Son, The Women of Brewster Place)
1958Judy Norton Taylor - Actress (The Waltons)
1962 Nicholas Turturro - Actor (NYPD Blue, The Hollow, Mo’ Better Blues, Witness to the Mob, Falling From the Sky: Flight 174) He is the brother of John Turturro
1970 Heather Graham – Actress (Hope Springs, From Hell, Bowfinger, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Six Degrees of Separation, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues)
1975 Sara Gilbert – Actress (The Connors, The Big Bang Theory, 24, Roseanne, Riding in Cars with Boys, High Fidelity, Poison Ivy)
1981 Jonny Lang – Blues musician and vocalist (Too Tired, Darker Side, Lie to Me, Still Rainin', Wander this World, Long Time Coming)
Died this Day
1820 King George III, age 82 - British king, he died ten years after mental illness forced him to retire from public life. Following his retirement, his son, the Prince of Wales, was named regent and upon his father's death ascended to the throne as King George IV. It has been suggested that George III was a victim of the hereditary disease porphyria, a defect of the blood that can cause mental illness when not treated. He spent the rest of his life in the care of his devoted wife, Charlotte Sophia, whom he had married in 1761. He died at Windsor Castle, ending a reign that saw both the US and French revolutions
1859 Seth Thomas, age 73 - US clock manufacturer who was one of the pioneers in the mass production of clocks. After working with Eli Terry and Silas Hoadley in firm of Terry, Thomas & Hoadley, which manufactured clocks by mass production methods, Thomas founded a clock factory of his own at Plymouth Hollow, Connecticut in 1812. He was not an inventive genius, but he was an excellent mechanic and a keen business man. Two years later he paid Terry for the rights to manufacture the latter's popular shelf clock. Shortly after, he was selling as many clocks as Terry. As his business developed Thomas built a mill for rolling brass and making wire at Plymouth Hollow, and operated it in conjunction with the clock factory. Finally, he organised the Seth Thomas Clock Company in 1853
1963 Robert Frost, age 88 - US poet (Birches, Mending Wall, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) He died in Boston
1964 Alan Ladd, age 50 - US actor (The Carpetbaggers, Citizen Kane, Shane, Star Spangled Rhythm, This Gun for Hire, Guns of the Timberland, Saskatchewan, The Great Gatsby) He died from an overdose of sedatives and alcohol
1977 Freddie Prinze, age 22 - Actor (Chico and the Man, The Million Dollar Rip-Off) He was the father of Freddie Prinze Jr
1980 Jimmy Durante, age 87 - US comedian, songwriter and vaudeville performer who was working almost up until his death
On this Day
1802 John James Beckley of Virginia, a clerk of the House of Representatives, was appointed the first librarian of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress, located in Washington, DC, was established two years earlier
1829 McGill University in Montréal was opened
1845 Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Raven, was first published, in the New York Evening Mirror
1856 Queen Victoria instituted The Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military decoration. The Victoria Cross medals were made from the metal of cannons used in the Crimean War
1861 Kansas became the 34th state of the Union. About two hundred years earlier the French Jesuit priests, Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, were among the region's earliest European explorers. A map drawn by Marquette in 1673 indicated that the Kanza, Ouchage (Osage), and Paneassa (Pawnee) tribes dominated the area that would become Kansas. The US acquired Kansas in 1803 from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase. During its early years as a US possession, the area was part of Indian Territory and was used by the federal government to relocate tribal peoples. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed the residents to decide if theirs would be a free or slave state. Both North and South sent settlers to the territory, giving rise to the sobriquet "Bleeding Kansas" as violence erupted out of ideological differences regarding slavery. Kansas entered the union as a free state
1891 Following the death of her brother, King Kalakaua, Queen Liliuokalani became the last monarch of the Hawaiian Islands
1900 The American League, consisting of eight baseball teams, was organised in Philadelphia
1929 Seeing Eye, the first guide-dog school to aid the blind, was founded in Nashville, Tennessee
1946 The famed racing schooner Bluenose sank after striking a reef off Haiti. The Nova Scotia-built vessel was designed by W.J. Roue of Halifax and built entirely of Nova Scotian materials, except for the masts. She was launched in March 1921, and was used for both for fishing and racing. She raced five times for the North Atlantic fishermen's championships and was never beaten. A likeness of the Bluenose can be seen on the Canadian dime
1947 Buckingham Palace was lit by candles as the temperature dropped to an all-time low of -16°F, producing nation-wide power cuts
1958 Actors Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward were married
1990 Former Exxon Valdez skipper Joseph Hazelwood went on trial in Anchorage, Alaska on charges stemming from the worst oil spill in US history. He was later acquitted of the major charges and convicted of a misdemeanour
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