1761 Madame Marie Tussaud – Swiss born French waxworks modeller who, during the French Revolution, made death masks from the severed heads of the famous. In 1800 she toured Britain, eventually setting up a permanent waxworks museum in London on Marylebone Road, just off Baker Street
1844 Queen Alexandra – Wife of Edward VII. She was the eldest daughter of King Christian of Denmark
1886 Rex Stout - Mystery writer who created the detective, Nero Wolfe (Fer-de Lance, The Doorbell Rang, Some Buried Caesar, Eeny Meeny Murder Mo, Champagne for One) He was a Sherlockian from the earliest days, and wrote the humorous article, Watson Was A Woman, in 1946 for the Baker Street Journal
1890 Buffalo Child Long Lance – Writer, actor and impostor. He was born Sylvester Long at Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Long Lance was of mixed Indian, white and possibly black ancestry. Passing himself off as a Cherokee named Sylvester Long Lance, he was able to enter the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. He fought in the Canadian Army during World War I, and then settled in Calgary, writing for several newspapers. In 1922 he was adopted by the Blood Indians, under the name Buffalo Child. In 1928 he published a fictitious autobiography, Long Lance, about growing up as a Blackfoot on the plains. In 1930, he starred in the film The Silent Enemy, a feature film about northern Canadian Indians before European contact. In 1932 he committed suicide when rumours of his true origins began circulating
1913 Mary Martin – Stage and screen actress and singer (South Pacific, Peter Pan, Happy Go Lucky, Birth of the Blues, Annie Get Your Gun) She was the mother of Larry Hagman
1923 Dick Shawn – Comedian and actor (Evil Roy Slade, Love at First Bite, Maid to Order)
1928 Malachi Throne – Actor (It Takes a Thief, Catch Me if You Can, Beau Geste, Ben Casey) He played Sandifer in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Simple Simon And he played False Face in the Batman TV series
1929 David Doyle – Actor (Charlie’s Angels, Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again, Capricorn One, Bridget Loves Bernie, Coogan’s Bluff)
1934 Billy Paul - Singer (Me and Mrs. Jones, Thanks For Saving My Life)
1935 Woody Allen – Writer, director and actor (Annie Hall, Sleeper, Play it Again Sam, Manhattan, Bananas)
1935 Lou Rawls - Singer (You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine, A Natural Man, Lady Love, Love Is A Hurtin’ Thing)
1939 Diane Lennon – Singer with her family group The Lennon Sisters (Tonight You Belong to Me) They appeared often on The Lawrence Welk Show
1940 Richard Pryor – Comedian and actor (Stir Crazy, Blue Collar, The Richard Pryor Show, Lady Sings the Blues, Silver Streak)
1945 John Densmore – Musician with The Doors (Light My Fire, Riders on the Storm, L.A. Woman)
1945 Bette Midler – Singer and actress (The Rose, From a Distance, Beaches, Devine Madness, Ruthless People, Outrageous Fortune, Gypsy)
1946 Gilbert O'Sullivan – Irish singer (Alone Again Naturally, Clair)
1951 Treat Williams – Actor (Deep Rising, Everwood, Guilty Hearts, The Devil's Own, Mulholland Falls, The Pursuit of DB Cooper, Prince of the City)
1958 Charlene Tilton - Actress (Dallas, Freaky Friday)
1961 Jeremy Northam – British actor (Wuthering Heights, Emma, Piece of Cake, The Net, Amistad, An Ideal Husband) He played Hugo Trent in the Poirot episode Dead Man’s Mirror
1967 Nestor Carbonell – Actor (Lost, The Dark Knight, Ringer, Cane, Smokin’ Aces, Suddenly Susan, Bates Motel)
1971 Emily Mortimer – British actress (Noah’s Ark, Shutter Island, Cider with Rosie, Dear Frankie, Love's Labour's Lost, Scream 3, Elizabeth) She is the daughter of Sir John Mortimer who wrote the Rumpole of the Bailey stories
Died this Day
1581 Edward Campion – Jesuit martyr who would become St. Edward. He was tried on a charge of treason for promoting Catholicism, and hanged in London
1859 John Sheridan Hogan – Canadian politician and newspaper publisher. He was robbed and murdered in Toronto’s Don Valley by thieves known as the Brook's Bush gang. His body would not be found until March, 1861, when it was pulled out of the river. Gang member James Brown was convicted and executed for the murder on March 10, 1862, in Toronto's last public hanging
1866 Sir George Everest – Welsh-born British military engineer and geodesist. He worked on the trigonometrical survey of India from 1818 to 1843, providing the accurate mapping of the subcontinent. For more than twenty-five years and despite numerous hardships, he surveyed the longest arc-of-the-meridian ever accomplished at the time. Everest was relentless in his pursuit of accuracy. He made countless adaptations to the surveying equipment, methods, and mathematics in order to minimise problems specific to the Great Survey: immense size and scope, the terrain, weather conditions, and the desired accuracy. Mount Everest was renamed in his honour in 1865
1973 David Ben-Gurion, age 87 - Israel's first prime minister, he died in Tel Aviv
1987 James Baldwin – US author and playwright (The Amen Corner, Go Tell It On The Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, A Deed From the King of Spain)
On this Day
1535 In Quebec, Jacques Cartier's men began to experience the effects of scurvy, due to lack of vitamin C in their diet. The Iroquois will show them how to make cedar tea as a cure
1640 The Spanish were driven out of Portugal and the country regained its independence
1680 A comet appeared close to Earth. The “Great Comet” was clearly visible for three months, until the end of February
1775 The Patriot armies of General Montgomery and Benedict Arnold assembled at Point Aux Trembles for the assault on Québec
1824 The presidential election was turned over to the US House of Representatives when a deadlock developed among John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford and Henry Clay
1841 Canada's first copyright was issued to Alexander Davidson for The Canadian Spelling Book, published by Rowell
1869 The vast Hudson's Bay Company territories were officially transferred to the Canadian government
1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual went on sale. This issue contained the story, A Study in Scarlet, which introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world
1906 The Cinema Omnia Pathé opened in Paris. It was the first picture palace built specifically for that purpose
1913 The first drive-in automobile service station opened, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was operated by the Gulf Refining Company. The brick, pagoda-style station featured free air, water, crankcase service, restrooms and a lighted sign for "Good Gulf Gasoline." It was open all night. Opening-day sales amounted to just 30 gallons, at 27¢ each. By the first Saturday, however, the word had spread, and Gulf sold over 350 gallons that day
1919 In Ontario, Ambrose Small sold his chain of theatres to Trans-Canada Theatres for $2 million. He promptly disappeared the following day. He was presumed murdered, but no trace of Small has ever been found
1922 New Brunswick drivers switched to driving on the right-hand side of the road
1942 Nationwide gasoline rationing went into effect in the US
1953 Marilyn Monroe was featured as the centrefold in the first edition of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine which he started with just $10,000
1953 RCA staged the first demonstration of movie projection on television sets by means of magnetic tape
1955 Rosa Parks, an African-American, refused to give her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. It was a violation of the city's racial segregation laws, and the 42-year-old seamstress was jailed. Three days after the incident, she was found guilty and ordered to pay a $10 fine, plus an additional $4 in court costs. Parks had no record of civil rights protests before the incident on the bus, and wasn't even aware that she had violated the law, as she was actually sitting in the first row that had been assigned to black people in the rear of the vehicle. But, because the front of the bus was full, the driver demanded that she give her seat to a white rider. Parks' refusal to give up her seat, and the controversy that ensued, resulted in a local boycott of the Montgomery bus system. The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott was organised by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. On November 13, 1956, the US Supreme Court struck down Alabama state and Montgomery city bus segregation laws as being in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. On December 20, Montgomery's buses were desegregated and the Montgomery Bus Boycott was called off after 381 days. Rosa Parks was among the first to ride the newly desegregated buses
1955 The first remote-control railroad passenger car went into service, running 7.5 miles between New Rochelle and Rye, New York. It was operated from a control panel in Larchmont, New York. The remote controller was able to start, stop, and accelerate the train up to seventy miles per hour
1959 The first colour photo of Earth was taken from space by a camera mounted on the nose of a Thor missile. The nose cone then plummeted to Earth with the camera and washed up on a beach in the Bahamas in February 1960
1959 Representatives of 12 countries, including the US, signed a treaty in Washington setting aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, free from military activity
1969 The US government held its first draft lottery since World War II
1990 British and French workers digging the Channel Tunnel between their countries finally met after knocking out a passage in a service tunnel, connecting the island of Britain with the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. Attempts to dig a tunnel between Britain and France date back to the 1880s, and as early as 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte conceived of a tunnel to aid in an invasion of England. However, it was not until the 1990s that the tunnel became a reality. The Channel tunnel was officially opened in May 1994 and featured two rail tunnels and a service tunnel. The Chunnel, as it came to be called, reduced travel time between England and France by 45 minutes
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