1841 Sir Wilfrid Laurier The eighth Canadian Prime Minister. He was Canada's first prime minister of French ancestry
1889 Edwin Powell Hubble US astronomer, born in Marshfield, Missouri. Hubble changed our view of the Universe with his revolutionary theory that the Universe is expanding, when in 1929 he was able to show that galaxies are moving away from us. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after him
1900 Chester Gould - Cartoonist (Dick Tracy)
1908 Sir Alistair Cooke British born US based broadcaster, journalist, TV host (Omnibus, PBS Masterpiece Theatre)
1913 Judy Canova Comedienne and actress (Judy Canova Radio Show, Carolina Cannonball, Oklahoma Annie, Chatterbox) She was the mother of Diana Canova
1919 Dulcie Gray Malaysia born British stage and screen actress (Howards Way, The Glass Mountain) She played Mrs. Lorraine Lee in the Rumpole of the Bailey episode, Rumpole and the Old Boy Net
1921 Phyllis Thaxter Actress (Jim Thorpe: All American, The World of Henry Orient, The Longest Night, Superman)
1925 Robert F. Kennedy US Senator and brother of President John F. Kennedy
1925 June Christy Singer with the Stan Kenton Band (Tampico, Shoo-Fly Pie, How High the Moon)
1926 Kaye Ballard - Actress, comedienne (The Perry Como Show, Freaky Friday, The Doris Day Show, The Mothers-In-Law, The Dream Merchants, Eternity)
1927 Estelle Parsons - Actress (Bonnie and Clyde, Dick Tracey, I Never Sang For My Father, Rosanne)
1929 Jerry Hardin Actor (The X-Files, Hidalgo, From the Earth to the Moon, The Firm, Pacific Heights, The Milagro Beanfield War, LA Law, Cujo)
1932 Richard Dawson - Actor, TV Host (Hogan's Heroes, The Running Man, Family Feud)
1939 Dick Smothers - Comedian (Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour)
1942 Joe Biden - 46th President of the United States. He was Vice President under President Barack Obama. Prior to that he represented Delaware in the United States Senate
1942 Norman Greenbaum - Singer (Spirit in the Sky)
1943 Veronica Hamel - Actress (Hill Street Blues, Here Come the Munsters, The Last Leprechaun)
1947 Joe Walsh - Musician with The Eagles (Hotel California)
1948 Richard Masur Actor (One Day at a Time, It, Fire Down Below, Multiplicity, Picket Fences, Encino Man, Risky Business, Heaven's Gate)
1956 Bo Derek - Actress (10, Bolero, Tarzan the Ape Man)
1959 Sean Young - Actress (Bladerunner, Stripes, Wall Street, No Way Out, Dune, Ace Ventura Pet Detective)
1963 Ming-Na Actress (ER, Inconceivable, Teddy Bears' Picnic, The Single Guy, The Joy Luck Club, As the World Turns, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)
1975 Joshua Gomez Actor (Chuck, Without a Trace, Invasion, Last Man Running)
Died this Day
1898 Sir John Fowler, 1st Baronet, age 81 British civil engineer who helped design and build the underground London Metropolitan Railway. He was also a joint designer of the Forth Bridge in Scotland
1910 Count Leo Tolstoy, age 82 Russian author (War and Peace, Anna Karenina) His parents died when he was a child, and he was raised by relatives. He went to Kazan University at age 16 but was disappointed in the quality of education there and returned to his estate in 1847 without a degree. He lived a wild and dissolute life in Moscow and St. Petersburg until 1851, when he joined the army, fighting in the Crimean War. In 1857, Tolstoy visited Europe and became interested in education. He started a school for peasant children on his estate and studied progressive educational techniques. He married in 1862. Later in his life, Tolstoy embraced Christian anarchism and was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian nobleman was engaged in a spiritual struggle and felt torn between his responsibility as a wealthy landlord to improve the lot of the people, and his desire to give up his property and wander the land as an ascetic. He had started giving away his possessions and declared that the public owned his works, but his wife, Sofya, worried about the financial stability of the couple's 13 children, gained control of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880. In 1910, he fled his home secretly with his youngest daughter but caught pneumonia and died at a remote railway station a few days later
1967 Casimir Funk, age 83 Polish born US biochemist who gave the world the word vitamin
1975 General Francisco Franco Spanish dictator, died after nearly four decades of absolute rule, and two weeks before his 83rd birthday
On this Day
1789 New Jersey became the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights
1820 The whaler Essex was the first US vessel to be sunk by a whale. The Essex, which hailed from Nantucket, Massachusetts, was attacked by a sperm whale near the western coast of South America. The whaler was in pursuit of sperm whales, or specifically the precious oil and bone that could be derived from them, when an enraged bull whale rammed the ship twice and capsized the vessel. The crew escaped in open boats, but only five of them survived the eighty-three-day journey to Peru, nearly 5,000 miles away
1866 Pierre Lallemont of Paris, France was issued the first US patent on a rotary crank bicycle, also called a velocipede, for fast foot. It soon came to be known as "the bone shaker" because of its stiff ride over the cobblestone roads of the day. Soon indoor riding academies, similar to roller rinks, could be found in large cities
1871 John and David McDougall arrived in Alberta and became the province's first farmers
1871 The first telegraph lines linked Winnipeg and Eastern Canada, via Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota
1893 The US Supreme Court held that the Great Lakes and their connecting waters constituted the "high seas." The US and Canada signed a treaty in 1909 which guaranteed the lakes free and open to both countries on equal terms
1903 The Saskatchewan city of Moose Jaw was incorporated
1906 Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce formed the Rolls-Royce Company and on this day in 1931 the company bought out Bentley Motors
1929 Salvador Dalis first one-man show was held in Paris
1931 The first commercial teletype service was inaugurated. The system, set up by AT&T, allowed messages typed on tape to be transmitted automatically to a central office, and then on to their destination. In December, Western Union Telegraph and the Postal Telegraph Company teamed up, allowing patrons of one service to transmit to patrons of the other service
1944 The lights of Piccadilly Square and the Strand were switched back on after five years of blackout due to World War II
1945 Twenty-four high-ranking Nazis went on trial in Nuremberg, Germany, for atrocities committed during World War II. The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by an international tribunal made up of representatives from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain. It was the first trial of its kind in history, and the defendants faced charges ranging from crimes against peace, to crimes of war, to crimes against humanity. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, the British member, presided over the proceedings, which lasted 10 months and consisted of 216 court sessions. In October 1946, twelve architects of Nazi policy were sentenced to death. Seven others were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 10 years to life, and three were acquitted. Of the original 24 defendants, one committed suicide while in prison, and another was deemed mentally and physically incompetent to stand trial. A few days after their sentencing, ten of the architects of Nazi policy were hanged. Hermann Goering, leader of the Gestapo and the Luftwaffe, who at sentencing was called the "leading war aggressor and creator of the oppressive program against the Jews," committed suicide by poison on the eve of his scheduled execution. Nazi Party leader Martin Bormann was condemned to death in absentia, but is now believed to have died in May 1945. Trials of lesser German and Axis war criminals continued in Germany into the 1950s and resulted in the conviction of 5,025 other defendants and the execution of 806
1947 Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten were wed in a ceremony that was recorded for broadcast world-wide. In a lavish wedding at Westminster Abbey in London, Princess Elizabeth married her distant cousin, Philip Mountbatten, a dashing young prince from the exiled Greek royal family. Philip had fought as a British naval officer during World War II. Elizabeth Windsor, the future Queen Elizabeth II, was twenty-one and Prince Philip, who was made the Duke of Edinburgh on the eve of the wedding, was twenty-six. The celebrations surrounding the wedding of the popular princess lifted the spirits of the people of Britain, who were suffering from serious economic difficulties in the aftermath of the war
1959 Top US DJ Allan Freed refused to deny being involved in a big payola scandal and was sacked from both TV and radio programmes
1969 The Nixon administration announced a halt to residential use of the pesticide DDT as part of a total phase-out in the US
1975 A bipartisan Senate investigation of activities by the FBI and the CIA released its report, charging both US government agencies with illegal activities. The committee, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, reported that both the FBI and the CIA had conducted illegal surveillance of over a hundred thousand US citizens, and charged the CIA with plotting to assassinate foreign leaders. The Senate committee also reported that the CIA had maintained a secret stockpile of poisons despite a specific presidential order to destroy the substances
1992 Fire seriously damaged the north-west side of historic Windsor Castle. It was the favourite weekend home of Queen Elizabeth II, and the destruction occurred on her 45th wedding anniversary
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