1728 John Hunter - Scottish physiologist, surgeon and dentist. He was the founder of pathological anatomy. He also made important discoveries concerning arteries and wrote a treatise entitled Blood and Gunshot Wounds
1813 Richard Moody - British engineer and colonial governor, born at Bournemouth, England. Moody was appointed to head the British Columbia detachment of the Royal Engineers in 1858, and became Lieutenant Governor of the new Crown Colony in 1859. For the next five years he built roads and town sites, policed the gold fields and set up the capital at New Westminster, before the Royal Engineers were disbanded in 1864
1849 Lord Randolph Churchill - English politician and father of Winston Churchill
1892 Grant Wood - US painter (American Gothic)
1900 Wingy (Joseph) Manone Trumpeter, singer and bandleader (Tar Paper Stomp, Nickel in the Slot, Flat Foot Floogie, Annie Laurie)
1903 Georges Simenon - Belgian crime novelist and creator of the Maigret mysteries. He could turn out a novel in under two weeks
1913 Woody Hayes - College Football Hall of Famer who was Ohio State's head coach for 33 years
1919 Tennessee Ernie Ford Country singer and composer (Sixteen Tons, The River of No Return, Hogtied Over You, Kiss Me Big, Softly and Tenderly) and author (Tennessee Ernie Ford's Book of Favourite Hymns)
1923 Chuck Yeager - Former US test pilot who was the first person to successfully break the sound barrier
1925 Gene Ames - Singer with the group The Ames Brothers (You You You Are the One, Rag Mop, Sentimental Me, Undecided, The Man with the Banjo, The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane, Tammy, Melodie d'Amour)
1927 Jim McReynolds - Guitarist, folk singer with the group Jim & Jesse (Freight Train, Diesel on My Tail, Ballad of Thunder Road, Golden Rocket)
1930 Dotty McGuire - Singer with the McGuire Sisters (Sincerely, Something's Gotta Give, He, Sugartime)
1933 Kim Novak - Actress (Picnic, The Man with the Golden Arm, Bell Book and Candle, Vertigo)
1933 Caroline Blakiston British actress (Miss Marple: At Bertram's Hotel, Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi, The Magic Christian, The Forsyte Saga) She played the Dowager Duchess of Lomond in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Three Gables She also played Hildegarde in The Sweeney episode Hearts and Minds
1934 George Segal - Actor (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Touch of Class, King Rat, Look Who's Talking Now, Taking the Heat, The Bridge at Remagen)
1938 Oliver Reed - British actor (The Prince and the Pauper, Women in Love, Oliver!) He was a former bouncer and boxer, and the nephew of British film director, Sir Carol Reed
1942 Carol Lynley - Actress (The Poseidon Adventure, Return to Peyton Place, The Stripper, Fantasy Island, Spirits)
1942 Peter Tork - Bassist and singer with The Monkees (Last Train to Clarksville, I'm a Believer, Daydream Believer)
1944 Stockard Channing Actress (The West Wing, Grease, The First Wives Club, Six Degrees of Separation, The Cheap Detective)
1944 Bo Svenson Swedish-born actor (Delta Force, Heartbreak Ridge, Walking Tall, Private Obsession, Kill Bill: Vol. 2)
1944 Jerry Springer Talk show host (The Jerry Springer Show) He was born in London, England, and is a former mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio
1950 Peter Gabriel - British singer who was with Genesis before his solo career (Big Time, Sledgehammer)
1951 David Naughton Actor (An American Werewolf in London, My Sister Sam, Hot Dog
The Movie, Separate Vacations)
1961 Richard Tyson Actor (Kindergarten Cop, Theres Something About Mary, Black Hawk Down, Genghis Khan: The Story of a Lifetime, Richard III)
1966 Neal McDonough Actor (Minority Report, Band of Brothers, Medical Investigation, Boomtown, Star Trek: First Contact, Flags of Our Fathers, Captain America: The First Avenger, Desperate Housewives)
Died this Day
1542 Catherine Howard - The fifth wife of England's King Henry VIII, she was executed for adultery
1728 Cotton Mather - US Puritan and Congregational minister associated with the Massachusetts witch trials. He died one day after his 65th birthday
1883 Richard Wagner - German composer. He died of a heart attack, in Venice
1954 Agnes Macphail, age 63 - Canada's first woman Member of Parliament. She had been a country schoolteacher who ran successfully in the 1921 federal election and continued to represent the Ontario region of Grey County until she was defeated in 1940. Macphail, who championed the rights of farmers and women, later became a member of the Ontario legislature. She was the first woman appointed to Canada's delegation to the League of Nations
1980 David Janssen, age 48 Actor (The Fugitive, Richard Diamond Private Detective, The Green Berets, Two Minute Warning, Francis Goes to West Point, Once is Not Enough, Centennial, Harry O, O'Hara U.S. Treasury)
2002 Waylon Jennings, age 64 Country singer (My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, Good Hearted Woman, Luckenbach Texas, Theme from The Dukes of Hazzard) and actor (Nashville Rebel, Stagecoach, Urban Cowboy) He narrated The Dukes of Hazzard TV show. He also played bass with Buddy Holly and The Crickets. He was supposed to have been on the plane with Buddy Holly that crashed, but instead gave his seat to J.P. Richardson, The Big Bopper
On this Day
1633 Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition. More than three centuries later, in 1992, the Vatican acknowledged that the ex-communicated astronomer had been right in saying the Earth revolves around the Sun, not vice versa
1635 The oldest public school in the United States, the Boston Public Latin School, was founded
1689 William of Orange and his wife, Mary the daughter of James II, were declared joint sovereigns of Great Britain and Ireland, ascending to the throne to reign as British King and Queen
1692 John Campbell, heading an English force, led a massacre of the Macdonald clan, in Glencoe, Scotland
1759 Nova Scotia became the first legislature in British territory to use the secret ballot, permitting secret voting
1832 The first cases of Asiatic influenza were reported at Limestone and Rotherhithe in London
1833 Hamilton, Ontario was incorporated as a city, the oldest in the province
1841 Kingston, Ontario was named Canada's capital
1854 Britain's first public school for girls, the Cheltenham Ladies College, was opened
1858 In Tanzania, Sir Richard Burton and John Speke were the first Europeans to discover Lake Tanganyika
1866 In Liberty, Missouri, the James Gang, the US's first well-organised robbery gang, held up its first bank, the Clay County Savings and Loans Association. The James Gang, usually made up of five members: Jesse and Frank James, and Cole, James and Robert Younger, met while serving as Confederate guerrillas during the Civil War. After the war's end in 1865, the two groups of brothers decided to use their military raiding skills to their own advantage and turned to armed robbery
1914 The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, known as ASCAP, was founded in New York City. This was the first US group to help protect copyrighted music against illegal public performances for profit. The group lobbied for the collection of license fees for each public performance of a copyrighted song and protection against other rights infringements
1917 Famed spy Mata Hari was arrested by French police. She was later executed by firing squad
1920 The League of Nations recognised the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland
1935 A jury in Flemington, NJ, found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-death of the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Hauptmann was later executed
1939 Gone with the Wind director George Cukor was fired. Producer David O. Selznick objected to the slow pace of filming, and star Clark Gable had personal conflicts with Cukor. Cukor was replaced the next day with Victor Fleming, who won that year's Academy Award for Best Director for the film
1945 A series of Allied planes began firebombing raids against the German city of Dresden, reducing the "Florence of the Elbe" to rubble and flames. Dresden was a medieval city renowned for its rich artistic and architectural treasures. More than 3,400 tons of explosives were dropped on the city by 800 British and US aircraft. The firestorm created by the two days of bombing set the city burning for many more days, littering the streets with charred corpses, including many children. Eight square miles of the city were ruined, and the total body count was between 35,000 and 135,000, as an approximation is all that was possible given that the city was filled with many refugees from farther east. The hospitals that were left standing could not handle the numbers of injured and burned, and mass burials became necessary. Among the US POWs who were in Dresden during the raid was novelist Kurt Vonnegut, who conveyed his experience in his classic antiwar novel Slaughterhouse Five
1946 The world's first electronic computer, ENIAC, was switched on. The Electronic Numerical Integration and Computer weighed several tonnes and contained 18-hundred tubes and six thousand manual switches, but wasn't nearly as powerful as today's pocket calculator
1948 The Science Museum in London announced that it would return the Wright Brother's biplane, the Kitty Hawk, the first to fly, to the Smithsonian Institution. It had been sent to England in 1928 by Orville Wright when he found that the Smithsonian had labelled another plane as the first capable of sustained flight
1954 "Why could not mother die?" wrote a 16 year old New Zealand schoolgirl in her diary on this day. In July of that year, Pauline Yvonne Parker and her close friend Juliette Hulme, used a brick wrapped in a stocking to club Mrs. Parker to death. Her mother had been concerned about the close friendship of the two girls. They were both found guilty, but were too young to be hanged, and were detained "at Her Majesty's pleasure" until 1958. Juliette Hulme rehabilitated herself, and went on to become a writer of Victorian mystery novels under the name Anne Perry
1959 The first Barbie Doll went on sale
1960 France exploded its first atomic bomb
1974 Dissident Soviet writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn was stripped of his citizenship and deported from the Soviet Union
1997 Discovery's astronauts hauled the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the shuttle for a one billion mile tune up to allow it to peer even deeper into the far reaches of the universe
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