1700 Daniel Bernoulli - Swiss mathematician who studied the motion of liquids. While researching blood flow and pressure Daniel and his assistant came up with a new way to measure blood pressure by piercing an artery with a glass pipe. This method was used for almost 200 years after its discovery
1819 John Ruskin - British art critic, artist, Gothic Revivalist and writer (Modern Painters, The Stones of Venice, Sesame and Lilies)
1820 William Tecumseh Sherman - US Civil War general who is famous for his march through Georgia, and for saying, 'War is hell'
1828 Jules Verne - French author who pioneered science fiction writing (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon)
1834 Ivanovich Mendeleyev - Russian chemist who formulated the periodic table of elements
1888 Dame Edith Evans - British actress (Scrooge, Look Back in Anger, David Copperfield, The Madwoman of Chaillot, The Importance of Being Earnest)
1894 William Avery 'Billy' Bishop - Canadian Air Vice-Marshal and fighter ace, who is known as the father of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Bishop shot down 72 German aircraft during World War I, 25 in one ten-day period in 1918. In August 1918 he joined the British Air Ministry and formed the Royal Canadian Air Force as a separate brigade
1906 Chester Carlson - US physicist and inventor of xerography
1919 Buddy Morrow - Bandleader (Night Train, Hey Mrs. Jones, theme from Man with the Golden Arm)
1920 Lana Turner - US actress (Ziegfeld Girl, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Madame X, Love Finds Andy Hardy, Peyton Place) Legend has it that she was discovered sipping soda at a Hollywood drugstore wearing a tight sweater. She became known as The Sweater Girl
1925 Jack Lemmon - US actor (Save the Tiger, Mr. Roberts, The Odd Couple, Grumpy Old Men, The Apartment, Days of Wine & Roses, Missing)
1926 Audrey Meadows – Actress (The Honeymooners, The Jackie Gleason Show, Too Close for Comfort, That Touch of Mink, Bob and Ray) She was born in Wu-ch'ang, China, and was the sister of Jayne Meadows
1927 Sir Stanley Baker - Welsh actor (The Guns of Navarone, Knights of the Roundtable, The Tell-Tale Heart, Zulu, The Last Grenade, How Green Was My Valley)
1930 Alejandro Rey - Actor (The Grace Kelly Story, Fun in Acapulco, The Flying Nun)
1931 James Dean - Actor (Giant, East of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause) He became a cult hero, despite having an acting career that lasted just 15 months
1932 John Williams - Composer-conductor (Jaws, Star Wars, Wagon Train, The Time Tunnel, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark)
1940 Ted Koppel - US journalist (Nightline)
1941 Nick Nolte - Actor (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, The Deep, Blue Chips, 48 Hours, The Prince of Tides, Extreme Prejudice)
1952 Carolyn Pickles - British actress (Emmerdale Farm, The Canterbury Tales, Poirot: Evil Under the Sun, Castles, May to December, The Mirror Crack'd, Broadchurch, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, The Bill)
1953 Mary Steenburgen - Actress (Cross Creek, Parenthood, Back to the Future III, The Butcher's Wife, Nixon)
1955 John Grisham – Author and lawyer (The Street Lawyer, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Firm, A Time to Kill)
1955 Ethan Phillips – Actor (Star Trek: Voyager, Benson, Out of Omaha, Lean on Me)
1959 Henry Czerny – Canadian actor (Clear and Present Danger, Revenge, Less Than Kind, The A-Team, The Tudors, The Ice Storm, Mission: Impossible, The Boys of St. Vincent)
1968 Gary Coleman - Actor (Diff'rent Strokes, Webster, The Kid from Left Field, The Fantastic World of D.C. Collins)
1974 Seth Green – Comedian and actor (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Robot Chicken, Family Guy, Mars Needs Moms, Entourage, Austin Powers in Goldmember, My Stepmother is an Alien)
Died this Day
1587 Mary Queen of Scots, age 44 - After nineteen years of imprisonment, she was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in England for her complicity in a plot to murder Queen Elizabeth I. Her son, King James VI of Scotland, calmly accepted his mother's execution, and upon Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, became king of England, Scotland, and Ireland
1725 Peter the Great - Emperor of Russia. He was succeeded by his wife, Catherine I
1781 Richard Stockton, age 50 - US lawyer and signer of the Declaration of Independence
1894 R.M. Ballantyne - Scottish adventure story writer (The Young Fur Traders, The Coral Island, Fighting the Flames, The Gorilla Hunter)
1985 Sir William Lyons, age 83 - British founder of Jaguar Motors, died in Wappenbury Hall, England. As a young entrepreneur, Lyons got his start making motorcycle sidecars in Blackpool, England. In 1926 he co-founded the Swallow Sidecar and Coachbuilding Company with William Walmsley. In 1934, his company released a line of cars called Jaguars. Lyons's most monumental achievement was perhaps the E Type Jaguar, which was the fastest sports car in the world when it was released in 1961
1990 Del Shannon, age 50 – Singer (Runaway, Hat's Off to Larry, Little Town Flirt, We'll Follow the Sun)
On this Day
1631 In London, England, King Charles I granted Cape Breton Island to Robert Gordon of Lochinvar
1692 Two teenage girls, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris, were declared by a doctor to be "under an evil hand," precipitating a series of sensational accusations in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. Williams and Parris were the teenage niece and daughter of local pastor Samuel Parris, who was immediately suspicious of the influence of his slaves, Tituba and John Indian. Soon after, the ailing girls were diagnosed as being under the spell of witches, and reported seeing Tituba in their hallucinations. Tituba and John Indian often practised their own religion, including fortune telling, in the Parris home with the girls present. Thus, Tituba was a convenient scapegoat for the girls' ailments. Parris beat her to confess, but she refused. Then, other girls who visited Abigail and Betty also began having fits and convulsions. The accusations against other witches also started in earnest, and soon, the entire town of Salem was caught up in the witch hysteria. Any pre-existing fears and grudges were now played out through accusations. More than half the accused were recent immigrants from England who were not well liked by the town's natives. By the end of the spring, the Salem jails were full of alleged witches. The Salem witch trials began in the summer of that year
1693 A charter was granted for the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia
1740 The Great Frost of London, which had started the preceding Christmas Eve, came to an end
1750 London, England experienced an earthquake. People fled to Hyde Park until the quakes, which caused little damage, subsided. This led to the creation of "earthquake gowns", warm garments to be worn outdoors while waiting for earthquakes
1879 In a lecture at the Canadian Institute in Toronto, Canadian engineer Sir Sandford Fleming advocated the adoption of Universal Standard Time by dividing the world into 24 equal time zones, with one standard time within each zone. Canadian and US railways adopted it four years later
1887 In an attempt to assimilate Native Americans, President Grover Cleveland signed an act to end tribal control of reservations and divide their land into individual holdings. Named for its chief author, Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes, the Dawes Severalty Act reversed the long-standing US policy of allowing Indian tribes to maintain their traditional practice of communal use and control of their lands. Instead, the Dawes Act gave the president the power to divide Indian reservations into individual, privately owned plots. The act dictated that men with families would receive 160 acres, single adult men were given 80 acres, and boys received 40 acres. Women received no land. The most important motivation for the Dawes Act was Anglo-American hunger for Indian lands. The act provided that after the government had doled out land allotments to the Indians, the sizeable remainder of the reservation properties would be opened for sale to whites. Consequently, Indians eventually lost 86 million acres of land, or 62 percent of their total pre-1887 holdings. The Dawes Severalty Act remained in force for more than four decades. In 1934, the Wheeler-Howard Act repudiated the policy and attempted to revive the centrality of tribal control and cultural autonomy on the reservations. The Wheeler-Howard Act ended further transfer of Indian lands to Anglos and provided for a return to voluntary communal Indian ownership, but considerable damage had already been done
1886 A peaceful demonstration comprising two rival organisations started in London's Trafalgar Square and turned into a riot with looting in Oxford Street, and the Pall Mall. It was known as Black Monday, and lead to the resignation of the police Commissioner
1910 The Boy Scouts of America was formally incorporated. It came about because of an event that occurred in London in 1909. Chicago publisher William Boyce was lost in one of the city's classic fogs when a Boy Scout came to his aid. After guiding Boyce to his destination, the boy refused a tip, explaining that as a Boy Scout he would not accept payment for doing a good deed. This anonymous gesture inspired Boyce to organise several regional US youth organisations, specifically the Woodcraft Indians and the Sons of Daniel Boone, into the Boy Scouts of America. The movement soon spread throughout the country, and in 1912, Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts of America in Savannah, Georgia
1915 D.W. Griffith's silent movie epic about the Civil War, The Birth of a Nation, premiered in Los Angeles
1952 Queen Elizabeth II took the oath of accession to the throne, following the death two days earlier of her father, King George VI
1960 The US Congress launched hearings into radio payola, whereby a radio station accepts payment for airing records
1969 The Boeing 747 made its maiden flight
1974 After 84 days in space the three-man crew of the Skylab space station, US astronauts Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson, and William Pogue, returned safely to earth
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