1811 Jean-Charles Chapais – Canadian businessman, politician and a Father of Confederation
1837 Dr Joseph Bell – Scottish physician who served as personal surgeon to Queen Victoria whenever she visited Scotland. He lectured at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh and emphasized the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who served for a time as Bell’s clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, based Sherlock Holmes on Dr Bell
1859 Georges Seurat - French painter (Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte)
1906 Peter Goldmark – Budapest born US inventor. His colour television, first demonstrated in 1940 and approved for commercial use after WWII, used a rotating, three-colour disk to project colour images. He also introduced the Long Playing Record in 1948, which used micro-grooves and held as much as three 78RPM disks. In 1950 he came up with the scanning system which allowed the US Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to relay pictures back to earth
1909 June Clyde – US actress (After the Ball, Country Fair, Charing Cross Road, Midnight Mystery) She played Eileen Forrester in the 1933 version of the Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet
1914 Ray Walston – Actor (My Favourite Martian, Damn Yankees, South Pacific, Picket Fences, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Apartment, Of Mice and Men, Popeye, The Silver Streak, The Sting)
1917 Ezra Stone – TV series director (The Munsters, Petticoat Junction, Lost in Space, The Flying Nun)
1924 Jonathan Frid – Canadian actor (Dark Shadows, Seizure, The Devil's Daughter)
1925 Julie Harris – US actress (Knots Landing, The Hiding Place, The Haunting, Member of the Wedding, Requiem for a Heavyweight, Backstairs at the White House)
1952 Keith Szarabajka - Actor (Equalizer, Missing, Golden Years, The Dark Knight, Angel)
1962 Tracy Austin - Tennis player
1968 Lucy Liu – Actress (Elementary, Ally McBeal, Charlie's Angels, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Chicago, Shanghai Noon, Why Women Kill, Kung Fu Panda, Southland)
1973 Monica Seles - Tennis player
1978 Nelly Furtado – Canadian singer (Fotografia, I'm Like A Bird, Forca, Explode)
1981 Britney Spears – Singer (Baby One More Time, Sometimes, Soda Pop, Oops I Did It Again, Toxic)
Died this Day
1547 Hernán Cortéz – Spanish conqueror of Mexico
1594 Gerhardus Mercator – Belgian born map maker
1859 John Brown, age 59 – US abolitionist, hanged in Charles Town, Virginia on charges of treason, murder, and insurrection after leading a group of twenty-one followers on a raid of the Federal arsenal of Harpers Ferry located in present-day West Virginia. On the day of his execution, 16 months before the outbreak of the Civil War, John Brown prophetically wrote, "The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood"
1982 Marty Feldman, age 49 – British comedian and actor (Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, Slapstick of Another Kind, Yellow Beard, The Last Remake of Beau Geste) He played Orville Sacker in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother
1990 Aaron Copland, age 90 – Composer (The Heiress, Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Red Pony) He died in North Tarrytown, NY
1995 Robertson Davies, age 82 - Canadian novelist and playwright (Tempest Tost, Leaven of Malice, A Mixture of Frailties, Fifth Business, World of Wonders, What’s Bred in the Bones)
2000 Gail Fisher - Actress (Mannix, Mankillers) She passed away at home from lung cancer. Twelve hours later, her brother Clifton, a businessman, died of heart failure
On this Day
1697 The rebuilt St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was opened. It was the work of Sir Christopher Wren
1793 Fleeing his debtors, 21-year-old British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge enlisted in the Light Dragoons, an English cavalry unit. Coleridge had fallen into dissolution and debt when he started college at Cambridge in 1791. He quickly regretted his impulsive move to join the force, and with the help of his brothers he was able to extract himself from the military and return to Cambridge
1804 In Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned Napoleon I, Emperor of France. He was the first Frenchman to hold the title of emperor in a thousand years. Pope Pius VII handed Napoleon the crown that the 35-year-old conqueror of Europe placed on his own head. The Corsican-born Napoleon, one of the greatest military strategists in history, rapidly rose in the ranks of the French Revolutionary Army during the late 1790s. By 1799, France was at war with most of Europe, and Napoleon returned home from his Egyptian campaign to take over the reigns of the French government and save his nation from collapse. After becoming first consul in February 1800, he reorganised his armies and defeated Austria. In 1802, he established the Napoleonic Code, a new system of French law, and in 1804 he established the French empire when he became emperor. By 1807, Napoleon's empire stretched from the River Elbe in the north, down through Italy in the south, and from the Pyrenees to the Dalmatian coast. Beginning in 1812, Napoleon began to encounter the first significant defeats of his military career, and finally endured total defeat against an allied force by 1814. Exiled to the island of Elba, he escaped to France in early 1815 and raised a new Grand Army that enjoyed temporary success before its crushing defeat at Waterloo against an allied force under Wellington that June. Napoleon was subsequently exiled to the island of Saint Helena off the coast of Africa, where he lived under house arrest with a few followers, until his death in May 1821. In 1840, his body was returned to Paris, and a magnificent funeral was held. Napoleon's body was conveyed through the Arc de Triomphe and entombed under the dome of the Invalides
1816 The Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, the first savings bank in the US, opened for business
1823 During his annual address to Congress, President James Monroe proclaimed a new US foreign policy initiative that became known as the Monroe Doctrine. Primarily the work of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine forbade European interference in the US, but also asserted US neutrality in regard to future European conflicts. This isolationist position became a cornerstone of the US foreign policy over the nineteenth century. The origins of the Monroe Doctrine stemmed from attempts by several European powers to reassert their influence in the Americas in the early 1820s. In North America, Russia had attempted to expand its influence in the Alaska territory, and in Central and South America the US government feared a Spanish colonial resurgence. Britain too was actively seeking a major role in the political and economic future of the Americas, and Adams feared a subservient role for the US in an Anglo-American alliance. The US invoked the Monroe Doctrine to defend its own increasingly imperialistic role in the Americas in the mid-19th century, but it was not until the Spanish-American War in 1898 that the US declared war against a European power over its interference in the American hemisphere
1852 The second French empire was proclaimed after a plebiscite confirmed Napoleon's nephew in power
1867 Charles Dickens gave his first public reading in the US, in a New York City theatre. Dickens was a hit with the US public, who anxiously awaited each instalment of his serialised novels. The queue for his first reading in New York was more than a mile long
1901 In the US, King Camp Gillette marketed a safety razor he had patented in 1897. It had a double-edged disposable blade
1902 The first working V-8 engine was patented in France by French engine designer Leon-Marie-Joseph-Clement Levavasseur. The engine block was the first to arrange eight pistons in the V-formation that allowed a crankshaft with only four throws to be turned by eight pistons
1942 The atomic age was born at the University of Chicago with a demonstration of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction when natural uranium metal rods were placed between alternate blocks of graphite
1939 New York's La Guardia Airport began operations as an airliner from Chicago landed at one minute after midnight
1954 The US Senate voted 65 to 22 to condemn Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonour and disrepute”. The condemnation, which is equivalent to a censure, related to McCarthy's investigation of thousands of suspected Communists in US government, military, and society. What is now known as "McCarthyism" began in February 1950, when McCarthy, a relatively obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, announced during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had in his possession a list of 205 communists who had infiltrated the US State Department. The unsubstantiated declaration, which was little more than a publicity stunt, thrust McCarthy into the national spotlight. These accusations prompted the Senate to form a special committee, headed by Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, to investigate the matter. The committee found little to substantiate McCarthy's charges, but McCarthy nevertheless touched a nerve with the public, and during the next two years he made increasingly sensational charges. In 1953, a newly Republican Congress appointed McCarthy chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations, and McCarthyism reached a fever pitch. In widely publicised hearings, McCarthy bullied defendants under cross-examination with unlawful and damaging accusations, destroying the reputations of hundreds of innocent officials and citizens. In the early months of 1954, McCarthy, who had already lost the support of much of his party because of his controversial tactics, finally overreached himself when he accused several US Army officers of communist subversion. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed for the investigation of McCarthy's conduct, and the subsequent televised hearings exposed McCarthy as a reckless and excessive tyrant who never produced proper documentation for any of his claims. On December 2, after a heated debate, the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy for conduct "contrary to senatorial traditions." By the time of his death from alcoholism in 1957, the influence of Senator Joseph McCarthy in Congress was negligible
1969 The Boeing 747 jumbo jet made its debut as 191 people, most of them reporters and photographers, flew from Seattle to New York City
1973 The rock group The Who and some of their entourage were jailed overnight in Montreal, Quebec. They had inflicted $6,000 worth of damage to a hotel, after a show at the Montreal Forum. The incident was later profiled in the John Entwistle song, Cell Block Number Seven
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