1478 Sir Thomas More - English statesman and author (Utopia, History of Richard III, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation) He disagreed with King Henry VIII's religious policies and was beheaded on a charge of treason in 1535. He was sainted in 1935
1700 Philippe Bauche - French geographer and cartographer who devised contour lines for maps and charts
1804 John Deere - US inventor of numerous agricultural implements
1812 Charles Dickens - British author (Little Dorrit, David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist….) He was born in Portsmouth, England, and was sent to work at age 12 because his father had been imprisoned for debt and his family faced destitution. The miserable treatment of children and the institution of the debtors' jail became the subject matter of several Dickens novels
1855 Charles Siringo - Cowboy, detective and author (A Texas Cowboy-or Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Cow Pony, A Cowboy Detective, Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism) He was one of the most famous chroniclers of the cowboy life, and played a pivotal role in creating the enduring US fascination with the Western cowboy. Unlike some of the subsequent popular accounts of western ranching written by eastern greenhorns, Siringo based his memoirs on his authentic experiences as a Texas cowboy, having spent years on trail drives and roundups during the short-lived golden era of the open range. In 1886, he hired on as a detective for the infamous Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Working out of the Pinkerton's Denver office, Siringo's career as a detective for hire was every bit as dramatic as his earlier years on the open range. In 1892, he infiltrated the radical labour movement in the mining region near Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where conflicts with management had become bitterly violent. Siringo spent four years pursuing the famous Wild Bunch at the behest of the railroad companies angered by the gangs' repeated train robberies. Siringo travelled more than 25,000 miles around the West chasing after Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and other gang members. When Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to South America, the Pinkertons finally forced Siringo to abandon the case. In 1907, Siringo left the Pinkertons and turned again to writing about his past adventures. He lived out his later years in California, and died in 1928
1867 Laura Ingalls Wilder - US author of the Little House series (Little House on the Prairie, Little House in the Big Woods, The Long Winter)
1883 Eubie Blake - US pianist and composer (Charleston, I'm Just Wild about Harry, Memories of You, Love Will Find a Way)
1885 Sinclair Lewis - US novelist and social critic (Elmer Gantry, Arrowsmith, Main Street)
1908 Buster Crabbe - Olympic Gold medal swimmer and actor (Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Billy the Kid)
1920 An Wang - Shanghai-born US inventor who, in 1948, invented the magnetic memory core, which served as the basis for all computer memory until the invention of the microchip. In 1951, he founded Wang Laboratories, which manufactured desktop calculators and later office computers
1934 Earl King - New Orleans blues musician (Those Lonely Lonely Nights, A Mother's Love)
1946 Pete Postlethwaite - British actor (The Duellists, In the Name of the Father, Sharpe's Company, Martin Chuzzlewit, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Amistad, The Usual Suspects)
1948 Jimmy Greenspoon - Musician with the group Three Dog Night (Joy to the World, It Ain't Easy, Shambalaya)
1955 Miguel Ferrer – Actor (Crossing Jordan, Traffic, Brave New World, The Stand, Another Stakeout, Hot Shots! Part Deux, Point of No Return, Twin Peaks, RoboCop, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) His parents were Rosemary Clooney and José Ferrer
1960 James Spader – Actor (The Blacklist, Boston Legal, Stargate, The Office, The Practice, Wolf, Bob Roberts, True Colors, Less Than Zero, Baby Boom, Mannequin, Pretty in Pink)
1962 Garth Brooks - Country singer (Friends in Low Places, Not Counting You, What's She Doing Now, Rodeo) He is married to Trisha Yearwood
1962 Eddie Izzard – Yemeni-born British comedian and actor (The Riches, Ocean’s Thirteen, Valkyrie, United States of Tara, Lost Christmas, Treasure Island)
1966 Chris Rock - US comedian and actor (Saturday Night Live, In Living Color, Lethal Weapon 4, Nurse Betty)
1978 Ashton Kutcher – Actor (That 70’s Show, Two and a Half Men, Dude Where’s My Car?, The Butterfly Effect, What Happens in Vegas, Punk’d)
1985 Tina Majorino – Actress (Veronica Mars, Napoleon Dynamite, Waterworld, Big Love, Corrina Corrina, Camp Wilder)
Died this Day
1873 Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - Irish novelist (In A Glass Darkly, Uncle Silas, The House by the Churchyard)
1894 Adolph Sax, age 79 - Belgian musical instrument maker who invented the saxophone in 1840 and patented it in 1846
1938 Harvey S. Firestone, age 89 - Founder of the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company, died in Miami Beach, Florida. At the age of 31, Firestone developed a new way of manufacturing carriage tires and began production with only 12 employees. Eight years later, Henry Ford asked Harvey Firestone to provide the tires for the Ford Model T, and Firestone Tires became a household name. Firestone and Ford remained fast friends, but neither man would live to see the marriage of their grandchildren and the legal union of their empires
2001 Dale Evans, age 88 - Singer and songwriter (Happy Trails to You), actress (The Roy Rogers Show) and author (Angel Unaware, Trials Tears and Triumphs, Say Yes to Tomorrow) She was the wife of the King of the Cowboys, Roy Rogers and starred with him in many movies. She died in Apple Valley, California of congestive heart failure
On this Day
1301 King Edward I of England revived the title of Prince of Wales, bestowing it on Edward of Carnarvon, later King Edward II
1758 Governor Charles Lawrence proclaimed a resolution passed by the Nova Scotia Council to organise the first Legislative Assembly of Nova Scotia. It was the first popularly elected parliament in Canada
1792 Free land was offered to US citizens settling in Canada
1837 Florence Nightingale became a nurse and left for the Crimean war. She paved the way for modern-day nursing and later became the first female recipient of the Order Of Merit
1845 The Portland Vase, a cameo glass Roman vase believed to date from 25BC and to have belonged to Emperor Augustus, was broken by William Lloyd, a drunken visitor to the British Museum. Its 200+ fragments were rebuilt, a process that has had to be redone periodically, as the glue discolours
1867 The British North America Act, to create the Dominion of Canada, was introduced in the British House of Lords by the Earl of Carnarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies
1891 Sir John A. MacDonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, gave his final speech in the House of Commons, declaring "A British Subject I was born, a British subject I will die"
1893 Elisha Gray of Highland Park, Illinois, patented a machine called the telautograph, which automatically signed autographs to documents. Gray worked on a number of other related instruments, including a telephone, which would eventually lead him to contest Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent. After a long legal battle in the US Supreme Court, Gray lost the patent rights to Bell; however, he still managed to patent more than sixty inventions during his lifetime
1904 The great Baltimore fire began as a small fire in the business district and was wind-whipped into an uncontrollable conflagration which by the evening had engulfed a large portion of the city. It raged for about 30 hours and destroyed more than 1,500 buildings in an eighty-block area, bringing property loss from the disaster to an estimated eighty million dollars. It was the most destructive fire in the US since the Great Chicago Fire of 1871
1914 Charlie Chaplin, age 24, made his first appearance in his popular "Little Tramp" role, in Kid Auto Races at Venice. His 1915 film The Tramp, which more fully developed the character, is considered Chaplin's first masterpiece. The endearing character, with his bowler hat, baggy suit, and expression of hapless innocence, came to be Chaplin's trademark
1915 The first wireless message was sent from a moving train to a station. The desire to keep contact with trains, ships, military troops, and other mobile operations motivated much of the research that led to modern telecommunications
1922 Lila Acheson Wallace and her husband Dewitt Wallace sold the first 5,000 copies of their new magazine, the Reader's Digest, the most-read periodical in history
1942 The US government ordered passenger car production stopped and factories converted to wartime purposes. In spite of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's exhortation that the US auto industry should become the "great arsenal of democracy," Detroit's executives were reluctant to join the war cause. However, following the bombing of Pearl Harbour, the country mobilised behind the US declaration of war. The government offered automakers guaranteed profits regardless of production costs throughout the war years. Furthermore, the Office of Production Management allocated $11 billion to the construction of war manufacturing plants that would be sold to the automobile manufacturers at remarkable discounts after the war. What had at first seemed like a burden on the automotive industry became a boon. The production demands placed on the industry and the resources allocated to the individual automobile manufacturers during the war would revolutionise US car making and bring about the Golden Era of the 1950s
1943 The Canadian government announced that shoe rationing would go into effect in two days, limiting each purchaser to three pairs for the remainder of the year
1964 The Beatles' invasion of North America began as thousands of screaming fans welcomed John, Paul, George and Ringo at New York's Kennedy Airport
1971 Women in Switzerland won the right to vote and to hold office
1984 Space shuttle astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart went on the first untethered space walk
1989 It rained sardines over the Australian town of Ipswich, 30 miles from the coastline. Scientists suggested that a violent storm caused updraughts which took the fish from the shallow Brisbane waters, up into the clouds, later to be deposited on the town
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