1707 Charles Wesley – British hymn writer who wrote over 5,500 hymns. He was an evangelist like his brother John, who founded Methodism
1779 Joseph Grimaldi – British pantomimist who first created the white-faced clown. His career began as a baby clown with his Italian immigrant family of clowns and dancers
1856 Sir Joseph John Thompson – British physicist who discovered the electron, and who won the Nobel Prize in 1906
1870 H.H. Munro – Burma-born author and short story writer, known as Saki (Reginald, The Chronicles of Clovis, The Unbearable Bassington, The Rise of the Russian Empire) The son of a Burma police officer, Munro was sent to live with his tyrannical aunts in England when he was 2. He joined the Burma police department but left because of ill health, and turned to writing
1904 Wilf Carter - Canadian country singer and songwriter (My Swiss Moonlight Lullaby, The Capture of Albert Johnson, My Texas Sweetheart, Golden Lariat, Old Alberta Plains) He was born in Port Hilford, Nova Scotia, and worked as a logger on the east coast before moving to Alberta in the 1920s. There, he worked as a cowboy, CPR trail rider and a barn dance entertainer before making his radio debut on Calgary's CFCN. He became a US radio star using the stage name Montana Slim. He had a six decade long career, live, and on radio and TV
1904 George Stevens - Director (A Place in the Sun, Giant)
1907 Christopher Fry – British poet and playwright (The Boy with a Cart, A Phoenix Too Frequent, The Dark is Light Enough)
1916 Betty Grable – Actress (Follow the Fleet, Tin Pan Alley, Pin-up Girl, Down Argentine Way, Sweet Rosie O'Grady) Her legs were insured for one million dollars, and made her the number one pin-up girl with the US WWII forces
1917 Ossie Davis – Actor (A Raisin in the Sun, Grumpy Old Men, Evening Shade)
1919 Anita O'Day - Jazz singer (Chickery Chick, Boogie Blues)
1938 Roger E. Mosley – Actor (Magnum P.I., Leadbelly, The Jericho Mile, Unlawful Entry)
1943 Keith Richards – Guitarist with The Rolling Stones (Time is on My Side, Satisfaction, Get Off of My Cloud) He met Mick Jagger when they were both students at the London School of Economics
1946 Stephen Spielberg - Director (Schindler's List, ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jurassic Park, The Color Purple)
1948 Bryan 'Chas' Chandler – Musician, bass guitarist with the Animals (House of the Rising Sun)
1955 Ray Liotta - Actor (Field of Dreams, Goodfellas, Corrina Corrina, The Rat Pack, Muppets from Space, Hannibal)
1963 Brad Pitt – Actor (Fight Club, Spy Game, Se7en, Inglourious Basterds, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Troy, Ocean’s Eleven, The Mexican, Meet Joe Black, The Devil’s Own, Thelma & Louise)
1964 Robson Green – British actor (Touching Evil, Wire in the Blood, Being Human, Christmas Lights, Reckless, Soldier Soldier, Grantchester)
1978 Katie Holmes – Actress (Dawson’s Creek, Batman Begins, Phone Booth, The Kennedys, Mad Money)
Died this Day
1737 Antonio Stradivari - The most renowned violin maker in history. He died in Cremona, Italy. He perfected the instrument and the secret was said to be in the varnish. Sherlock had a Strad
1878 John Kehoe - The last of the Molly Maguires. He was the last of 20 men executed in Pennsylvania for killing a police officer, although it was widely believed he was innocent. The Molly Maguires were an Irish secret society that had allegedly been responsible for some incidences of vigilante justice in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. They defended their actions as attempts to protect exploited Irish-American workers, and they are often regarded as one of the first organised labour groups. Miners worked under dangerous conditions and were severely underpaid. Small towns owned by the mining companies further exploited workers by charging exorbitant rent for company housing. In response to these abuses, secret societies like the Molly Maguires sprung up, leading sporadic terrorist campaigns to settle worker/owner disputes. Industry owners became increasingly concerned about the threat posed by the Molly Maguires, and Franklin B. Gowen, the president of Reading Railroad, hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the secret society and find evidence that could be used against them. The Sherlock Holmes story, The Valley of Fear, is loosely based on the coalfields and the Molly Maguires
1997 Chris Farley, age 33 – Comedian and actor (Saturday Night Live, Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, Wayne’s World 2)
On this Day
1787 New Jersey became the third US State
1792 In Quebec City, Jean-Antoine Panet was elected the first President of the Lower Canada Assembly. They were the first Quebec elections
1865 The 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, abolishing slavery, was formally adopted into the US Constitution, ensuring that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Earlier in the month, Alabama became the 27th state to ratify the 13th Amendment, thus giving it the requisite three-fourths majority of states' approval necessary to make it the law of the land. Alabama, a former Confederate state, was forced to ratify the amendment as a condition for re-admission into the Union. The 13th Amendment was officially adopted into the Constitution 246 years after the first shipload of captive Africans landed at Jamestown, Virginia, and were bought as slaves
1888 While searching for stray cattle in the isolated canyons of southwest Colorado, Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law, Charles Mason, stumbled upon the magnificent ancient Indians ruins of Mesa Verde. The site is now the Mesa Verde National Park, created by Congress in 1906
1889 The first Canadian Pacific Railway telegraph junction with the Atlantic cable was made at Canso, Nova Scotia
1892 The Nutcracker Suite by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia
1898 Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat set the world's first official land speed record in Acheres Park near Paris: 39.245 miles per hour in his Jeantaud automobile, powered by an electric motor and alkaline batteries. The Jeantaud is widely believed to be the first automobile steered by a modern steering wheel rather than a tiller. The tiller was quickly replaced by the steering wheel in the early 1900s
1912 The Piltdown Man was discovered by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, after three years of digging in the Piltdown gravel pit in Sussex, England. It was claimed to be the fossilised skull and remains of the earliest known European. Dawson announced the discovery of two skulls that appeared to belong to a primitive hominid and ancestor of man, along with a canine tooth, a tool carved from an elephant's tusk, and fossil teeth from a number of prehistoric animals. Despite muted criticism from a minority of palaeontologists, the majority of the scientific community hailed the so-called Piltdown Man as the missing evolutionary link between ape and man. The remains were estimated to be up to a million years old. For the next decade, scientists heralded the finding of Eoanthropus dawsoni, or "Dawson's Dawn-man" in Latin, as confirmation of Darwin's controversial theory of human evolution. In the 1920s and '30s, however, the Piltdown gravels were found to be much less ancient than believed, and other finds of human ancestors around the world seemed to call the authenticity of the Piltdown Man into question. In 1953, at an international congress of palaeontologists, the Piltdown Man was first openly called a fraud. An intensive study of the remains showed that they were made up of a modern human cranium which was no more than 600 years old, the jaw and teeth of an orangutan, and the tooth of a chimpanzee. Microscopic tests indicated that the teeth had been doctored with a file-like tool to make them seem more human. Scientists also found that the bones had been treated with chemicals to make them appear older. Other fossils found in the Piltdown quarry proved to be authentic but of types not found in Britain. The person who orchestrated the hoax never came forward, but in 1996 a trunk in storage at the British Museum was found to contain fossils treated in the exact same manner as the Piltdown remains. The trunk bore the initials M.A.C.H., which seemed to suggest that Martin A.C. Hinton, a volunteer at the British Museum in 1912 and later a curator of zoology at the institution, was likely the culprit. Some theorised that he was attempting to embarrass Arthur Smith Woodward, curator of the British Museum's palaeontology department, because Woodward had refused Hinton's request for a weekly pay raise
1916 The Battle of Verdun, the longest engagement of World War I, ended after 10 months and massive loss of life. Earlier in the year, on February 21st, German forces under General Erich von Falkenhayn launched an offensive against Verdun, a city 137 miles east of Paris. The outlying forts of Hardaumont and Douaumont soon fell, but the French rallied under General Henri Pétain, and a bloody stalemate ensued in which thousands of soldiers fell daily. On July 1st, a major British offensive in the Somme River region relieved some of the pressure on Verdun, as did the Brusilov Offence by Russia on the eastern front. By mid-December, the French had recovered most of the ground lost in the early days of the battle. When the Battle of Verdun ended, with a French victory, 23 million shells had been fired and 650,000 lives lost
1936 Su-Lin became the first giant panda imported to the US from China
1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai, David Lean's film version of Pierre Boulle's Second World War novel, premiered in New York
1957 The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first nuclear facility to generate electricity in the US, went online
1968 At Cornwall, Ontario, the St. Regis Mohawks blocked the Seaway International Bridge to protest customs duties on their US purchases. They claimed an exemption under Jay's Treaty of 1794
1969 Britain's Parliament abolished the death penalty for murder
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