1684 Edward (Old Grog) Vernon – British Admiral who got his nickname when he ordered his captains to dilute the men’s rum with water to cut down on drunkenness
1815 Elizabeth Cady Stanton – US suffragist, born in Johnstown, New York
1840 Auguste Rodin – French sculptor (The Thinker, The Kiss) His first exhibition in 1900 gained him an international reputation
1842 John William Strutt, Lord Rayleigh – British physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for successfully isolating the inert gas argon
1889 DeWitt Wallace – US publisher who founded Reader's Digest, along with his wife, Lila Bell Acheson. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a minister and his wife. After high school, Wallace worked in a bank and began keeping an index-card file of his favourite magazine articles. He later attended the University of California at Berkeley. After condensing some government pamphlets into booklets, Wallace became convinced he could create a popular periodical by condensing other readings, but his plan was interrupted by World War I. He joined the Army and was wounded. While recovering, he began to explore his idea, assembling a sample issue and sending it to publishers, who consistently rejected the idea. DeWitt and Lila decided to start the magazine themselves. Working out of a basement in Manhattan, the couple published their first issue in February 1922, with an initial run of 1,500 copies. By 1929, circulation had reached 200,000 and was growing. In 1933, the magazine began publishing original articles, and the following year began to condense books. The magazine continued growing rapidly and by the end of the 20th century had the largest circulation of any publication in the world, with more than 17 million readers in dozens of countries and some 20 languages
1903 Jack Oakie - Actor (Lover Come Back, The Rat Race, Tin Pan Alley, The Texas Rangers)
1917 Jo Stafford – US singer (You Belong To My Heart) She sang both solo, and with Tommy Dorsey’s band
1920 Richard Quine - Actor (Babes on Broadway, For Me and My Gal) and director (The World of Suzy Wong, Bell Book and Candle, Sex and the Single Girl)
1920 Sunset Carson - Actor (Stage Door Canteen, Rio Grande Raiders, Alias Billy the Kid)
1922 Kim Hunter – Actress (Requiem for a Heavyweight, Backstairs at the White House, A Streetcar Named Desire, Planet of the Apes)
1925 Agnes Nanogak – Canadian artist and printmaker, born at Baillie Island, North West Territories. She has also illustrated 2 books of Inuit stories (Tales from the Igloo, More Tales from the Igloo)
1929 Grace Kelly – US born Princess Grace of Monaco, and former actress (To Catch a Thief, The Country Girl, Rear Window, Dial M for Murder, High Society, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, High Noon) She married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956
1937 Ina Balin – Actress (The Comancheros, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Charro!, The Patsy)
1943 Brian Hyland – US singer (Sealed with a Kiss, Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini)
1943 Wallace Shawn – Actor (The Princess Bride, My Dinner With André, National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation, My Favourite Martian, Young Sheldon)
1944 Booker T. Jones – Musician with Booker T & the MGs (Green Onions, Time is Tight)
1945 Neil Young – Canadian singer and songwriter (Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Heart of Gold, This Note’s for You, Cinnamon Girl, Down By The River, Harvest Moon) He was a member of Buffalo Springfield, Crazy Horse, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
1958 Megan Mullally – Actress (Will & Grace, Children’s Hospital, Bee Movie, Stealing Harvard)
1961 Nadia Comaneci – Romanian gymnast and Olympic Gold Medallist
1966 David Schwimmer – Actor (Friends, Band of Brothers, The Wonder Years)
1982 Anne Hathaway – Actress (The Devil Wears Prada, Alice in Wonderland, Get Smart, Bride Wars, The Princess Diaries, The Hustle, Interstellar, Les Misérables) She also played Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises
Died this Day
1035 Canute II – King of England and Denmark from 1016, who put Viking chiefs in charge of Northumbria and East Anglia
1865 Elizabeth Gaskell – British author (Wives and Daughters, Cranford, Mary Barton, Sylvia’s Lovers, Ruth, Round the Sofa)
1939 Dr. Norman Bethune, age 59 – Canadian-born thoracic surgeon, died of septicaemia in North China. Born in 1880 in Gravenhurst, Ontario, he worked for most of his life in China, where he was revered as a hero
1990 Eve Arden, age 82 - Actress (Our Miss Brooks, Anatomy of a Murder, Grease, Stage Door, Tea for Two, No No Nanette, Mildred Pierce)
On this Day
1840 The Imperial Government set up a magnetical and meteorological observatory at Toronto
1859 French acrobat Jules Leotard made his debut in Paris. He performed on his invention, the Flying Trapeze, without a safety net. His costume, which other trapezists adopted, was named after him
1867 After more than a decade of ineffective military campaigns and infamous atrocities, a conference began at Fort Laramie to discuss alternative solutions to the so-called “Indian problem” and to initiate peace negotiations with the Sioux. The US had been fighting periodic battles with Sioux and Cheyenne tribes since 1854. That year, the Grattan Massacre inspired loud calls for revenge, though largely unjustified, against the Plains Indians. Full-scale war erupted on the plains in 1864, leading to vicious fighting and the tragic Sand Creek Massacre, during which Colorado militiamen killed 105 Cheyenne women and children who were living peacefully at their winter camp. By 1867, the cost of the war against the Plains Indians, the Army's failure to achieve decisive results, and news of atrocities like those at Sand Creek turned the US public and Congress against the Army's aggressive military solution to the "Indian problem." Concluding that peaceful negotiations were preferable to war, the attendees at the Fort Laramie conference initiated talks with the Sioux. The talks bore results the following year when US negotiators agreed to abandon US forts on the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming and Montana, leaving the territory in the hands of the Sioux. However, the promise of peace on the central plains was fleeting. Concern about wars between the different Indian tribes led the US to renege on its promise to provide guns to the Cheyenne, and the angry Indians took revenge on Kansas settlements, killing 15 men and raping 5 women. By late 1868, US soldiers were again preparing for war on the Plains
1880 A mine explosion in Foord Pit at Stellarton, Nova Scotia in Pictou County killed 50 coal miners. The Pictou County coal fields are made dangerous by thick, gassy seams which are prone to spontaneous combustion and explosion. Of the 650 known mining deaths in the area, 246 were from explosions
1884 Calgary, Alberta, became a town
1902 Tenor Enrico Caruso cut the first of several versions of what would become the first recording to sell a million copies, a selection from the opera I Pagliacci. Caruso recorded the song a second time in 1907, and again in 1910
1918 Austria was declared an independent republic for the first time in its history, one day after the end of World War I. From the late thirteenth century to the end of WW I, the history of Austria was largely that of its ruling house, the Hapsburgs. After the fall of Napoleonic France in the early nineteenth century, the Hapsburg's Austrian Empire became the continent's dominant power. In 1867, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was established, with one Hapsburg monarch serving as both emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. In 1914, a Serbian nationalist's assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir apparent to his great-uncle, Emperor Francis Joseph, helped ignite WW I. Austria-Hungary joined the Central Powers with Germany, Bulgaria, and Turkey, and the country was in economic and political ruin by the time of the Central Powers' defeat in 1918. In the aftermath of the war, Austria and Hungary were declared independent republics, and Emperor Charles I, ruler of Austria-Hungary since 1916, was forced to abdicate. In 1919, Austria voted to abolish the monarchy, and over six hundred years of Hapsburg rule officially came to an end
1927 Josef Stalin became the undisputed ruler of the Soviet Union as Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party
1927 The Holland Tunnel between New York City and Jersey City, New Jersey, was officially opened when President Calvin Coolidge telegraphed a signal from the presidential yacht, Mayflower, anchored in the Potomac River. Within an hour, over 20,000 people had walked the 9,250-foot distance between New York and New Jersey under the Hudson River, and the next day the tunnel opened for automobile service. The double-tubed underwater tunnel, the first of its kind in the US, was built to accommodate nearly 2,000 vehicles per hour. Chief engineer Clifford Milburn Holland resolved the problem of ventilation by creating a highly advanced ventilation system that changed the air over thirty times an hour at the rate of over 3,000,000 cubic feet per minute
1942 Pharmaceutical giant Bayer patented polyurethane
1946 The US Army staged a contest pitting its fastest mechanical adding machine against an abacus. The abacus operator beat the adding machine operator in four out of five tests
1946 The world's first drive-in banking window was opened by the Exchange National Bank of Chicago, Illinois. It featured such drive-in banking innovations as tellers' windows protected by heavy bullet-proof glass, and sliding drawers that enabled drivers to conduct their business from the comfort of their vehicle
1954 Ellis Island closed after processing more than 20 million immigrants since opening in New York Harbour in 1892
1980 More than three years after its launching, Voyager I edged within 78,000 miles of Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system. Cameras beamed pictures 950 million miles back to California, where scientists were stunned. The high-resolution time-lapse photos confounded all known laws of physics. Saturn had not four, but hundreds of rings. The rings appeared to dance, buckle, and interlock in ways never thought possible
1987 China's first North American fast-food restaurant, Kentucky Fried Chicken, opened in Beijing
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