1312 Edward III – King of England whose incompetence reached a climax when he invaded Scotland and was soundly beaten by Bruce at Bannockburn. He was the father of Edward the Black Prince, and John of Gaunt
1850 Robert Louis Stevenson – Scottish author and traveller (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child's Garden of Verses)
1903 Thomas Raddall – British-born Canadian writer (The Pied Piper of Dipper Creek and Other Tales, His Majesty's Yankees)
1906 Hermione Baddeley – British actress (A Christmas Carol, There Goes the Bride, Little House on the Prairie, Maude, Before the Fringe, Mary Poppins, The Belles of St. Trinian's) She played Frontier Fanny in the Batman episodes The Great Escape and The Great Train Robbery
1918 Jack Elam – Actor (Support Your Local Sheriff, High Noon, Gunfight at the OK Corral, Rawhide)
1922 Madeleine Sherwood - Actress (The Flying Nun, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Hurry Sundown, Sweet Bird of Youth)
1922 Oskar Werner - Actor (Ship of Fools, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Voyage of the Damned, Fahrenheit 451)
1932 Richard Mulligan – Actor (Soap , Empty Nest, Little Big Man, The Hero)
1933 Adrienne Corri – Scottish actress (A Clockwork Orange, The Tell-Tale Heart, Dr. Zhivago) She played Angela in the 1965 Sherlock Holmes movie, A Study in Terror
1934 Garry Marshall – Producer (The Odd Couple, Mork & Mindy, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Evil Roy Slade), director (Pretty Woman, Overboard, Runaway Bride) and actor (Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Murphy Brown, Soapdish) He is the brother of Penny Marshall
1938 Jean Seberg - Actress (Paint Your Wagon, The Mouse that Roared, Airport, Joan of Arc)
1947 Joe Mantegna – Actor (The Godfather Part III, The Money Pit, Three Amigos, Soap, Bugsy, The Rat Pack, A&E’s Spencer movies, Joan of Arcadia)
1952 Art Malik – Actor (True Lies, Second Sight: Hide and Seek, City of Joy, The Living Daylights, A Passage to India, The Jewel in the Crown)
1954 Chris Noth – Actor (Law & Order, Jakarta, Sex and the City, Cast Away, The Good Wife)
1955 Whoopi Goldberg – Actress and comedian (Sister Act, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Ghost, The Color Purple, Soapdish, Corrina Corrina, The View)
1956 Rex Linn (CSI: Miami, Cliffhanger, Rush Hour, Tin Cup, After the Sunset, Blast from the Past, Wyatt Earp)
1959 Caroline Goodall – British actress (Schindler’s List, Hook, Cliffhanger, The Sculptress, The Princess Diaries)
1975 Aisha Hinds – Actress (Detroit 1-8-7, The Next Three Days, Dollhouse, Assault on Precinct 13, Mr. Brooks)
Died this Day
1854 John Peel – British farmer and huntsman who is the subject of John Graves’ hunting song, D’ye Ken John Peel. He is buried in Caldbeck in the Lake District
1974 Karen Silkwood - A technician at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. She was killed in a car crash under mysterious circumstances. The movie, Silkwood, was based on her story
1983 Junior Samples - Comedian (Hee Haw) He died of a heart attack
On this Day
1789 The first presidential tour concluded as George Washington, who was inaugurated as the first president of the US in April, returned to Washington. For four weeks, Washington travelled by stagecoach through New England, visiting all of the northern states that had ratified the US Constitution. Washington, the great war hero and first leader of the new republic, was greeted by enthusiastic crowds wherever he went
1789 Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to a friend in which he said, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”
1805 Viennese butcher Johann Lahner invented a new sausage. He called it a frankfurter
1833 A spectacular meteor storm in the early morning hours led to the first formulation of a theory on the origin of meteors. The skies were lit up by meteors and described by Agnes Clerke “On the night of November 12-13, 1833, a tempest of falling stars broke over the Earth. The sky was scored in every direction with shining tracks and illuminated with majestic fireballs. At Boston, the frequency of meteors was estimated to be about half that of flakes of snow in an average snowstorm. Their numbers were quite beyond counting; but as it waned, a reckoning was attempted, from which it was computed, on the basis of that much-diminished rate, that 240,000 must have been visible during the nine hours they continued to fall." Reactions to the display varied from the hysterics of the superstitious claiming Judgement Day was at hand, to the just plain excitement of the scientific. Newspapers of the time revealed that almost no one was left unaware of the spectacle, for if they were not awakened by the cries of excited neighbours, they were usually awakened by flashes of light cast into normally dark bedrooms by the fireballs. At that time, the true nature of meteors were not known for certain, but theories were abundant in the days and weeks which followed. The Charleston Courier published a story on how the sun caused gases to be released from plants recently killed by frost. These gases, the most abundant of which was believed to be hydrogen, "became ignited by electricity or phosphoric particles in the air." The United States Telegraph of Washington, DC, stated, "The strong southern wind of yesterday may have brought a body of electrified air, which, by the coldness of the morning, was caused to discharge its contents towards the earth." Despite these early, creative attempts to explain what had happened, it was Denison Olmsted who ended up explaining the event most accurately. After spending the last weeks of 1833 trying to collect as much information on the event as possible, Olmsted presented his early findings in January 1834. First of all, he noted the shower was of short duration and that the meteors radiated from a point in the constellation of Leo. Finally, noting that an abnormal display of meteors had also been observed in Europe and the Middle East during November 1832, Olmsted theorised that the meteors had originated from a cloud of particles in space. Although the exact nature of this cloud was not explained properly, it did lead the way to a more serious study of meteor showers, and new information continued to surface following the 1833 display which helped shed new light on the origin of the Leonid meteor showers
1851 The telegraphic service between London and Paris began operating
1907 The first helicopter rose 6-1/2 feet above the ground in a field in Normandy. It was powered by two motor driven propellers above the pilot
1909 The Ballinger-Pinchot scandal erupted in the US when Colliers magazine accused Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger of shady dealings in Alaskan coal lands. Ballinger was an appointee of President William Taft, the man who had succeeded the committed conservationist President Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had developed most of his environmentally friendly policies with the assistance of his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot. By 1909, Roosevelt, Pinchot, and other conservationists feared that their fellow Republicans, Taft and Ballinger, were systematically undermining the accomplishments of the previous administration by reopening to exploitation public lands that had been closed. The Colliers article charged that Ballinger improperly used his office to help the Guggenheims and other powerful interests illegally gain access to Alaskan coal fields, confirming the worst fears of Pinchot and Roosevelt. Despite the fact that he had stayed on as chief forester in the Taft administration, Pinchot began to criticise openly both Ballinger and Taft, claiming they were violating the fundamental principles of both conservation and democracy. Livid with anger, Taft immediately fired Pinchot, inspiring yet another round of scandalous headlines. The controversy over the Ballinger-Pinchot affair soon became a major factor in splitting the Republican Party. Roosevelt concluded that Taft had so badly betrayed the ethics of conservation that he had to be ousted, prompting Roosevelt’s unsuccessful challenge to Taft on the independent Bull Moose ticket in 1912. Subsequent scholarship has shown that Ballinger had not technically misused the power of his office
1914 Mary Jacobs patented the brassiere
1921 The movie, The Sheikh, was released. Its star, Rudolph Valentino, was to become the silver screen's first male sex symbol
1933 In Austin, Minnesota, striking workers at the packing plant of George A. Hormel and Company (Spam), held the first sit-down strike in US labour history. The technique was a variation on earlier methods of striking, such as refusal-to-work strikes and stay-in strikes, and proved the most effective of the three in discouraging violence. Three days later, the Industrial Commission of Minnesota began mediation hearings, and by mid-December the strike was peaceably resolved
1936 King Edward VIII told Prime Minister Baldwin that he intended to marry the twice-divorced Mrs. Simpson
1939 US inventor Henry Jeffers demonstrated a machine that could milk more than 1,600 cows in seven hours
1940 Walt Disney’s Fantasia had its world premičre at New York’s Broadway Theatre
1956 In an historic civil rights victory, the US Supreme Court ruled that segregation by race on public transportation was unconstitutional. The decision came after nearly a year of organised protest in Montgomery, Alabama. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was ignited in December of 1955 after African-American Rosa Parks was arrested when she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a crowded bus, violating a city law requiring her to relinquish her seat to the white citizen who wanted to be seated. Four days later, Montgomery civil rights leaders, headed by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a non-violent protest that crippled the city's transportation economy and helped motivate the civil rights movement in the US. Thirty-six days after the ruling, the Supreme Court decision took effect, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was called off. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks were among the first people to ride in Montgomery's newly integrated buses
1979 Radio station CJCD went on the air in Yellowknife, North West Territories. It was the first private radio station in the North West Territories
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