1758 Maximilien François Isidore de Robespierre - French Jacobin leader and a principal figure in the French Revolution
1856 Sigmund Freud - Austrian neurologist and the founder of modern psychology and psychoanalysis
1856 Robert Peary - US arctic explorer who is credited with being the first to reach the North Pole. Some believe lesser-known explorer Frederick A. Cook reached the pole first, but in 1911, the US Congress formally recognised Peary's claim
1895 Rudolph Valentino - Legendary US silent-screen star, born in Castellaneta, Italy (The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheikh)
1904 Raymond Bailey – Actor (The Beverley Hillbillies, My Sister Eileen, The Absent Minded Professor, King Creole, Vertigo, The Incredible Shrinking Man) He guest-starred in Private Secretary, The Ann Sothern Show and Perry Mason
1913 Stewart Granger - British actor (The Man in Grey, Beau Brummell, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Virginian) He was born 'James Stewart', but changed his name to avoid confusion with the famous US actor. He played Sherlock Holmes in a 1972 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles
1915 Orson Welles - US director, producer, writer and actor (War of the Worlds, Citizen Kane, The Mercury Radio Theatre of the Air, The Long Hot Summer, A Man for All Seasons, MacBeth, Moby Dick, Casino Royale, Catch-22)
1931 Willie Mays - Baseball Hall of Famer who was known as "The Say Hey! Kid"
1945 Bob Seger – Musician, singer and leader of the Silver Bullet Band (Night Moves, Travelin' Man, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, Against the Wind, Fire Lake, Old Time Rock’n’Roll)
1947 Alan Dale – New Zealand actor (Lost, The O.C., Ugly Betty, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 24, Once Upon a Time, The Killing, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo)
1952 Gregg Henry – Actor (Rich Man Poor Man Book II, Scandal, Any Day Now, 24, The Riches, Gilmore Girls, Slither, Femme Fatale, Payback, Body Double) He played John Orlando in the Perry Mason TV movie The Case of the Grimacing Govenor
1953 Tony Blair – Former British Prime Minister
1953 Lynn Whitfield – Actress (The Josephine Baker Story, The Women of Brewster Place, Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI, Head of State, The Wedding, Eve's Bayou, The Cosby Mysteries)
1960 Roma Downey – Irish actress (Touched By An Angel, Devlin, The Last Word, A Secret Life)
1961 George Clooney – Actor (Batman & Robin, O Brother Where Art Thou?, ER, Roseanne, Spy Kids, Up in the Air, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Ocean’s Eleven, Solaris, Michael Clayton)
1983 Adrianne Palicki – Actress (Friday Night Lights, Supernatural, Legion, South Beach, John Wick, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, The Orville)
1983 Gabourey Sidibe – Actress (Precious, The Big C, Tower Heist, Yelling to the Sky, American Horror Story, Empire)
1993 Naomi Scott – British actress (Terra Nova, Lemonade Mouth, Life Bites)
Died this Day
1862 Henry David Thoreau, age 44 - US philosopher, naturalist and author (On Walden Pond, Early Spring in Massachusetts, The Maine Woods, A Yankee in Canada)
1910 King Edward VII, age 69 - The eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, he was 61 when he was crowned and gave his name to the Edwardian Age in English manners, fashion and literature
1919 Lyman Frank Baum - US author (The Wizard of Oz series of books) He died nine days before his 63rd birthday
1952 Maria Montessori - Italian teacher and education pioneer who devised the Montessori system of teaching
1992 Marlene Dietrich, age 90 - German actress (Destry Rides Again, The Blue Angel, Blonde Venus, Morocco, Kismet, Seven Sinners)
On this Day
1642 Montréal was officially established under its original name, Ville Marie
1733 The first international boxing match took place at Figg's Amphitheatre, London, when Bob Whittaker beat Italy's Tito di Carni
1840 Britain's first postage stamps, the Penny Black and the two-penny blues, officially went on sale in Britain. A few days earlier, some of the Penny Blacks were sold before the official release date, and are now very valuable
1851 US inventor Linus Yale patented his Yale lock
1859 The last log of the ill-fated Franklin expedition was discovered by Robert Hobson of the McClintock expedition. He found a cairn with a paper signed by Fitzjames and Crozier, dated April 25, 1848, confirming their disaster with the Franklin expedition as they searched for the North West passage
1861 Arkansas seceded from the Union
1877 Nearly a year after the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Chief Sitting Bull (Tatanka-Iyotanka) led 1,500 Lakota Sioux into Canada to ask protection from the Queen. They were hoping to find safe haven from the US Army. Sitting Bull and his band stayed in the Grandmother's Country, called that in honour of Queen Victoria, for the next four years. They would settle at Wood Mountain, in what is now Saskatchewan. Before establishing himself, he warned the Cypress Hills Mounted Police, which was 200 miles away, about his arrival in Canada and requested a meeting with them. During the meeting, Sitting Bull produced a gold medal and said: "My Grandfather received this medal in recognition of his battle for George III during the revolution. Now in this odd time, I direct my people here to reclaim a sanctuary of my Grandfather." Sitting Bull was advised that he and his tribe were welcome in Canada, but, like other citizens, if they did not obey the laws of her Majesty, the Mounted Police would deal with them. During the weeks and months that followed, the state of the Sioux as well as that of the Canadian Indian and Métis people was deteriorating due to declining bison populations and food shortages. Meanwhile, emissaries from the US came to his camp and promised Sitting Bull's followers they would be rich and happy if they joined the US reservations. The temptation was too great, and many headed south. By early 1881, Sitting Bull was the chief of only a small band of mostly older and sick people. That July, Sitting Bull and 187 of his followers journeyed back across the Medicine Line and surrendered to the US authorities at Fort Buford, in what is now North Dakota
1882 The US Congress passed, despite President Chester Alan Arthur's veto, the Chinese Exclusion Act. It barred Chinese immigrants from the US for 10 years
1889 The Paris Exposition formally opened, featuring the just completed Eiffel Tower
1901 At Queenston, Ontario, the Niagara Parks Commission signed a deal with Cataract Construction to divert water around Niagara Falls to generate hydro electricity. It was the start of Niagara's hydro industry
1915 Babe Ruth, of the Boston Red Sox, hit his first major-league home run
1919 The British Admiralty recommended that helium, a non-flammable, lighter-than-air gas, was a safe substitute for hydrogen filled balloons and airships
1937 The airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built, burst into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. On May 3rd, the Hindenburg left Frankfurt, Germany, for a journey across the Atlantic to Lakehurst's Navy Air Base. The airship, which stretched 804 feet from stern to bow, carried 97 people – a crew of 61 and 36 passengers. While attempting to moor at Lakehurst, the airship suddenly burst into flames, possibly due to a static charge which had built up while passing through a thunderstorm. While it had been earlier thought that static discharge ignited its hydrogen core, current theories point to it igniting the flammable paint which covered the Hindenberg’s outer hull. Rapidly falling 200 feet to the ground, the hull of the airship incinerated within seconds. Thirteen passengers, 21 crewmen, and 1 civilian member of the ground crew lost their lives. Most of the survivors suffered substantial injuries. Radio announcer Herb Morrison, who came to Lakehurst to record a routine voice-over for an NBC newsreel, immortalised the Hindenberg disaster in a famous on-the-scene description in which he emotionally declared, "Oh, the humanity! All the passengers, I don't believe it." The recording of Morrison's commentary was immediately flown to New York, where it was aired as part of the US's first coast-to-coast radio news broadcast. Lighter-than-air passenger travel rapidly fell out of favour after the Hindenberg disaster, and no rigid airships survived World War II
1939 John Steinbeck was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath
1941 Dictator Josef Stalin assumed the Soviet premiership, replacing Vyacheslav M. Molotov
1942 Irving Berlin's White Christmas was published
1954 At the Iffley Road track in Oxford, England, medical student Roger Bannister became the first to break the four-minute mile, finishing in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. He went on to become a neurologist, and a Master of Pembroke College, Oxford
1954 The US House of Representatives approved the US joining Canada in construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway
1959 Raymond Burr won the Emmy for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, for his role as Perry Mason, in which he played a crime-solving attorney. The popular show, which debuted in 1957, ran for nine years. Derived from mystery novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, the character of Perry Mason had made his radio debut in 1943 and the show continued until 1955. The sleuthing Perry Mason character was revived in a series of TV movies from 1985 to 1993
1960 Britain's Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong-Jones, a commoner, at Westminster Abbey. They divorced in 1978
1962 In the first test of its kind, the submerged submarine USS Ethan Allen fired a Polaris missile armed with a nuclear warhead that detonated above the Pacific Ocean
1994 Queen Elizabeth and French President François Mitterrand attended ceremonies in Calais, France, officially opening a rail tunnel connecting Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. The channel tunnel, or "Chunnel," connects Folkestone, England, with Sangatte, France, 31 miles away. Napoleon's engineer, Albert Mathieu, planned the first tunnel under the English Channel in 1802, envisioning an underground passage with ventilation chimneys that would stretch above the waves. In 1880, the first real attempt was made by Colonel Beaumont, who bore a tunnel more than a mile long before abandoning the project. Other efforts followed in the 20th century, but none on the scale of the tunnels begun in 1986. At a cost of $16 billion, millions of tons of earth were moved to build the two rail tunnels, one for northbound and one for southbound traffic, and one service tunnel. The Chunnel cut travel time between England and France by 45 minutes, and the monumental number of workers needed to build it provided a much needed boost to the economies of Britain and France
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