1724 Admiral Samuel Hood, First Viscount – British naval commander who was one of the most skilful tacticians. He had many notable victories, including those in the West Indies in 1782
1745 John Jay – US statesman and the 1st Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court
1821 Gustave Flaubert – French novelist (Madame Bovary , Salammbo, Sentimental Education, A Simple Heart) He was born in Rouen, the son of the hospital’s chief surgeon. Flaubert began writing stories in his teens, and in 1840, went to Paris to study law but failed his exams. Three years later, he had a nervous breakdown and retired to a small town outside Rouen to write. In 1846, he began a long, tempestuous affair with poet Louise Colet, which ended bitterly in1855. Meanwhile, he travelled extensively with French writer Maxime du Camp, taking extended walking tours with her and journeying to Greece, Syria, and Egypt from 1849 to 1851. When Flaubert returned from the journey, he began work on Madame Bovary, which took five years to write. The book was serialised in Revue de Paris in 1856. The novel, about the romantic illusions of a country doctor's wife and her adulterous liaisons, scandalised French traditionalists. Flaubert was brought to trial for obscenity in 1857. He was acquitted and the book became a popular success
1863 Edward Munch – Norwegian painter (The Scream)
1893 Edward G. Robinson – Bucharest born actor (Little Caesar, Key Largo, Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street) He had one of the finest collections of modern paintings, which he sadly had to sell in a divorce settlement. It is said that he made so many films in order to pay for the paintings
1915 Francis Albert Sinatra – Legendary US singer known as the Chairman of the Board (My Way, Three Coins in the Fountain, Chicago) and actor (The Manchurian Candidate, The Seven Ups, From Here to Eternity, Guys and Dolls, The Man With the Golden Arm) He was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the son of an Italian fireman
1918 Joe Williams - Jazz singer with Count Basie, and actor (The Bill Cosby Show)
1923 Bob Barker - TV game-show host (The Price is Right, Truth or Consequences)
1927 Honor Blackman – British actress (Goldfinger, The Avengers, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Upper Hand, Age of Innocence, Jason and the Argonauts)
1938 Connie Francis - Singer (Stupid Cupid, Where the Boys Are, Lipstick on Your Collar, I'll Follow the Boys, Who’s Sorry Now?)
1940 Dionne Warwick - Singer (Do You Know the Way to San Jose, I Say a Little Prayer, There’s Always Something There To Remind Me)
1946 Emerson Fittipaldi – Brazilian motor racing champion
1948 Tom Wilkinson – British actor (The Importance of Being Earnest, The Full Monty, The Gathering Storm, Shakespeare in Love, Sense and Sensibility, A Pocketful of Rye) He played Jake Normington in the Inspector Morse episode The Infernal Serpent
1949 Bill Nighy – British actor (Love Actually, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Hot Fuzz, Page Eight, Valkyrie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, The Constant Gardener, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Shaun of the Dead, Longitude, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) He portrayed Giles Culpepper QC in the Kavanagh QC episode Ancient History
1957 Sheila E. - Singer-drummer (The Glamorous Life)
1958 Sheree J. Wilson – Actress (Dallas, Walker Texas Ranger, Our Family Honor)
1970 Jennifer Connelly – Actress (A Beautiful Mind, Requiem for a Dream, He’s Just Not That Into You, Mulholland Falls, The Rocketeer, Labyrinth)
1975 Mayim Bialik – Actress (Blossom, Beaches, The Big Bang Theory, Pumpkinhead, Call Me Kat, Jeopardy)
Died this Day
1889 Robert Browning, age 77 – British poet (The Ring and the Book, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, A Blot on the ‘Scutcheon, Red Cotton Night-Cap Country) He married the poet Elizabeth Barrett in September 1846. He died in Italy, and is buried in London’s Westminster Abbey
1894 Sir John Thompson – The 4th Canadian Prime Minister, and former Premier of Nova Scotia. He died at Windsor Castle of a heart attack just minutes after being sworn in by Queen Victoria as a member of the Privy Council. His body was brought home to Canada by a British warship
1939 Douglas Fairbanks Sr, age 56 – Actor best remembered as a swashbuckling hero in silent films (The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, The Thief of Baghdad, Robin Hood) He died of a heart attack, in Santa Monica, California
1968 Tallulah Bankhead, age 65 – Stage and screen actress (The Trap, Tarnished Lady, Lifeboat, The Little Foxes) Born to a prominent Alabama family, her father William Brockman Bankhead was a US congressman and served as Speaker of the House. She died in New York, of pneumonia. She played the Black Widow in the Batman episodes Black Widow Strikes Again and Caught in the Spider’s Den
1970 Roy Spencer - Father of Toronto Maple Leaf rookie hockey player, Brian Spencer. Roy was shot and killed by the RCMP outside a Prince George, BC, TV station after he had forced it off the air at gunpoint because it was not carrying a game between the Leafs and the Chicago Blackhawks, which was to include an interview with his son. Brian Spencer was himself shot and killed in June 1988 in Florida
1971 David Sarnoff, age 80 – Russian born US broadcasting pioneer, who became CEO of RCA and NBC. Sarnoff moved to New York at age nine. At seventeen, he took a job as a telegraph messenger boy and used his first paycheque to buy a telegraph to teach himself Morse code. Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company hired him as a telegraph operator. In 1912, Sarnoff was the first telegraph operator in the US to pick up the Titanic's distress call. He remained at his post for seventy-two hours, monitoring the call and passing on information
1977 Clementine, Baroness Spencer-Churchill – Widow of Sir Winston Churchill
1985 Anne Baxter, age 62 – Actress (All About Eve, Cimarron, The Ten Commandments) She also played Olga, Queen of the Cossacks and Zelda in the Batman TV series Her grandfather was architect, Frank Lloyd Wright
On this Day
1792 In Vienna, 22-year-old Ludvig Van Beethoven received his first lesson in music composition from Franz Joseph Haydn
1896 The Katzenjammer Kids, the pioneering comic strip created by Rudolph Dirks, made its debut in the American Humorist, the Sunday supplement of the New York Journal. Inspired in part by a series of German children's stories from the 1860s, The Katzenjammer Kids relate the adventures of "Hans and Fritz," twins and fellow combatants against the authority of "Mama," their mother, "der Captain," a shipwrecked sailor who serves as their surrogate father, and "der Inspector," the dreaded school official. The Katzenjammer Kids remained in continuous publication through the next century
1899 A patent was granted to inventor George Grant for the golf tee
1901 Italian physicist Guglielmo Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic wireless, or radio, signal at St. John's, Newfoundland, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The inventor of wireless telegraphy flew a box kite trailing 400 feet of copper wire to a telephone to pick up the faint clicking sounds of Morse code transmitting the letter “S” from 2,232 miles away across the ocean at Poldhu wireless station in Cornwall, England. After his successful experiment, he wrote, "I now felt for the first time absolutely certain that the day would come when mankind would be able to send messages without wires not only across the Atlantic but between the farthest ends of the earth." Today, the Newfoundland hill on which he stood is called Signal Hill. Four days after his success, Marconi would be officially notified by the Anglo-American Telegraph Company that it would take legal action against him unless he immediately ceased his wireless experiments and removed his equipment from Newfoundland. The AATC had a fifty-year monopoly on electrical communications in Newfoundland starting in 1858, and saw Marconi as a serious threat to its transatlantic electric telegraph business operated by submarine cables. Marconi soon moved his base of operations to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Marconi's earliest wireless discoveries went unappreciated by Italian authorities, but the British government commissioned him to keep working. In 1909, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in physics with the German radio innovator Ferdinand Braun. After successfully sending radio transmissions from points as far away as England and Australia, Marconi turned his energy to experimenting with shorter, more powerful radio waves, and developed the radio, as well as the principles that laid the groundwork for television transmission. He died in 1937, and on the day of his funeral all BBC stations were silent for two minutes in tribute to his contributions to the development of radio
1913 Two years after it was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Mona Lisa was recovered inside Italian waiter Vincenzo Peruggia's hotel room in Florence. Peruggia had previously worked at the Louvre and had participated in the heist with a group of accomplices dressed as Louvre janitors one morning in August 1911. Leonardo da Vinci, one of the great Italian Renaissance painters, completed The Mona Lisa, a portrait of the wife of wealthy Florentine citizen Francesco del Gioconda, in 1504. The painting, also known as La Gioconda, depicts the figure of a woman with an enigmatic facial expression that is both aloof and alluring, seated before a visionary landscape. After the recovery of The Mona Lisa, Peruggia was convicted in Italy of the robbery and spent just 14 months in jail. The Mona Lisa was eventually returned to the Louvre, where it remains today, exhibited behind bulletproof glass. It is arguably the most famous painting in the world and is seen by millions of visitors every year
1917 Father Edward Flanagan, a 31-year-old Irish priest, founded Boys Town outside Omaha, Nebraska, as a home for troubled and neglected children, and a half-dozen boys entered to seek a better life. Flanagan, who previously ran the Workingmen's Hotel, a haven for down-and-out workers in Omaha, understood that mistreated or orphaned children were at high risk of turning to delinquency and crime in later years. Boys Town rapidly filled up with the arrival of additional children, many of whom were sent by local courts. Others were referred to the home by citizens, and some wandered off the streets and through the home's unlocked doors on their own accord. In the spring of 1918, no space was left in the drafty Victorian mansion at 106 North 25th Street, so Father Flanagan, assisted by sympathetic citizens, moved Boys Town to a building 10 times the size on the other side of town. The vacant building was the German-American Home, which, with the US declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, had become the most despised building in the city. Within months, enrollment at Boys Town had soared to more than 100 boys, and a school was established that later grew into an institution with a grade school, a high school, and a career vocational center. Before the new building was four years old, more than 1,300 neglected boys from 17 states had passed through Boys Town. In 1921, Boys Town expanded again with the financial assistance of the people of Omaha, this time to a farm 10 miles west of Omaha. The institution remains at this site today and has changed its name to "Girls and Boys Town" to reflect its co-ed enrollment
1925 The first motel, the Motel Inn, opened in San Luis Obispo, California
1936 The Duke of York was proclaimed King George VI, one day after his brother, King Edward VIII abdicated the British Throne. George VI took the Throne two days before his 41st birthday
1946 A United Nations committee voted to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to be the site of UN headquarters
1951 The St. Lawrence Seaway Authority was established by an Act of Canadian Parliament
1955 Christopher Cockerell patented his prototype of the hovercraft
1955 Bill Haley and the Comets recorded See You Later Alligator at Decca Recording Studios, NY
1957 Five months before he divorced his second wife, singer Jerry Lee Lewis married 13 year old Myra Lewis, the daughter of his cousin. The scandal nearly ruined his career
1984 The Ontario government put an end to "Happy Hours" in Ontario bars
1985 A US jet transport crashed after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland, killing 248 US soldiers on leave and eight crew members
1989 Canadian Pacific Rail ran the first regular freight train through the 9 mile Mount MacDonald Tunnel, at Revelstoke, BC. It is the longest rail tunnel in the Americas
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