1519 Pedro Menendez de Aviles - Spanish navigator and explorer who established Florida as a Spanish colony
1564 Galileo Galilei - Italian astronomer and physicist, born in Pisa
1809 Cyrus Hall McCormick - US engineer and inventor of the first practical mechanical reaper
1812 Charles Lewis Tiffany - US jeweller whose name is synonymous with high quality jewellery
1820 Susan B. Anthony - Suffragist who was the first US woman to be pictured on a coin, the Susan B. Anthony dollar
1834 William Henry Preece - Welsh electrical engineer who played an important role in the introduction of the wireless telegraph and telephone in Great Britain. As an engineer for the Post Office, he introduced numerous inventions, including a railroad signal and his own wireless telephone. Preece also introduced Alexander Graham Bell's telephone to Great Britain. Perhaps most importantly, Preece helped radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi attain the Post Office's assistance for his work on the wireless telegraph, later known as radio
1882 John Barrymore – Actor (Rasputin and the Empress, Grand Hotel, Arsène Lupin, Svengali, Moby Dick, Raffles, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Bulldog Drummond) He played Sherlock Holmes in the 1922 movie Sherlock Holmes He was the brother of Lionel and Ethel, and the grandfather of Drew Barrymore
1899 Gale Sondergaard – Actress (The Life of Emile Zola, The Letter, Road to Rio, The Mark of Zorro, Anna and the King of Siam, A Night to Remember)
1907 Cesar Romero – Actor (Captain from Castile, Julia Misbehaves, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Falcon Crest, The Thin Man, Wee Willie Winkie, Springtime in the Rockies, Ocean’s 11, The Little Princess, Passport to Danger, Around the World in 80 Days) He played The Joker in the Batman TV series
1914 Kevin McCarthy - Actor (Death of a Salesman, Hotel, Twilight Zone: The Movie, The Colbys, Final Approach, The Addams Family Reunion) He starred in the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and had a cameo in the 1978 remake
1922 Hank Locklin - Country singer (Please Help Me I'm Falling, Send Me the Pillow You Dream On, Let Me Be the One, Happy Journey)
1927 Harvey Korman - Entertainer, actor (The Carol Burnett Show, The Tim Conway Show, Blazing Saddles)
1931 Claire Bloom - British stage and screen actress (Separate Tables, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Alexander the Great, Anastasia, Brideshead Revisited, The Haunting, A Doll's House, Miss Marple's The Mirror Crack'd, Florence Nightingale, Doc Martin, The King’s Speech)
1934 Niklaus Wirth - Swiss computer programmer and inventor of the PASCAL computer language
1942 Sherry Jackson - Actress (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Make Room for Daddy) She also played Madeline Randall in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Festive Felon
1944 Mick Avory - Rock musician with The Kinks (Lola, You Really Got Me, Come Dancing)
1947 Rusty Hamer - Actor (Make Room for Daddy)
1951 Melissa Manchester - Singer (Don't Cry Out Loud, Midnight Blue, You Should Hear How She Talks About You)
1951 Jane Seymour - British actress (Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, Somewhere in Time, War and Remembrance, Live and Let Die)
1954 Matt Groening - Cartoonist (The Simpsons)
1955 Christopher MacDonald – Actor (Harry’s Law, Boardwalk Empire, An American Carol, Mad Money, Kickin it Old School, Family Law, The Perfect Storm, Requiem for a Dream, Happy Gilmore, Grumpy Old Men, Fatal Instinct, Thelma & Louise, Grease 2)
1964 Chris Farley – Actor/comedian (Saturday Night Live, Tommy Boy, Black Sheep, Beverly Hills Ninja, Airheads, Coneheads)
Died this Day
1744 John Hadley - British inventor of the sextant, which was an important navigational tool
1933 Anton J. Cermak - Chicago Mayor who was killed in Miami during an assassination attempt on President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt
1965 Nat King Cole - US singer and pianist (Ramblin' Rose, Too Young, Sweet Lorraine, Unforgettable, Mona Lisa, Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer) He died of lung cancer a month before his 46th birthday
1984 Ethel Merman - Stage and screen actress (Girl Crazy, Gypsy, Alexander's Ragtime Band, There's No Business Like Show Business, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Airplane!) She played Lola Lasagne in the Batman episodes The Wail of the Siren, The Sport of Penguins, and A Horse of Another Color
1996 McLean Stevenson, age 66 – Actor ( M*A*S*H, Hello Larry, The Tim Conway Comedy Hour, The Doris Day Show, Condo)
On this Day
1625 Samuel de Champlain was made the representative of the viceroy to Canada and instructed to find a route to China
1764 The city of St. Louis, Missouri was established when Pierre Laclède founded a fur trade post at that site
1781 At Coteau du Lac, Québec, on the St. Lawrence River, Williman Twiss completed construction of North America's first lock canal
1879 President Hayes signed a bill allowing female attorneys to argue cases before the Supreme Court
1881 Canada's House of Commons passed a bill incorporating the Canadian Pacific Railway Company
1882 The first cargo of frozen meat left New Zealand bound for Britain on the SS Dunedin
1898 A massive explosion of unknown origin sunk the battleship USS Maine in Cuba's Havana Harbour, killing 266 of the 354 US crewmembers. One of the first US battleships, the Maine weighed over 6,000 tons and was built at a cost of more than two million dollars. The Maine had been sent to Cuba on a goodwill mission and to protect the interests of Americans there after a rebellion against Spanish rule broke out in Havana in January. An official US naval court of inquiry reported in March of that year, that the ship had been blown up by a mine without laying blame on any person or nation in particular. However, an outraged American public overwhelmingly blamed Cuba's Spanish occupation force. Subsequent diplomatic failures to resolve the Maine matter, coupled with US indignation over Spain's brutal suppression of the Cuban rebellion and continued losses to US investment, lead to the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April of 1898
1902 Oldsmobile ran its first national automobile advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post. Ransom Olds was no stranger to innovations in the field of publicity having sent one of his assistants on a voyage from Detroit to New York in a 1901 Olds Runabout a year earlier
1922 The first session of the permanent court of international justice was held at The Hague
1930 Cairine Wilson became Canada's first woman Senator
1950 Walt Disney premiered his masterpiece of animation, Cinderella
1961 Seventy-three people, including an eighteen member US figure skating team, were killed in the crash of a Boeing 707 in Belgium. The skaters were enroute to a world meet in Czechoslovakia
1965 Canada's new maple leaf flag was publicly unfurled in ceremonies on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. As early as 1610, Britain's Union Jack, or Royal Union Flag flew over the new British colony of Lower Canada, and over the rest of the Canadian territory since 1763, when France lost its sizeable colonial possessions in Canada. In 1867, the Dominion of Canada was established as a self-governing federation within the British Empire, and three years later a new flag, the Canadian Red Ensign, was adopted. In 1925, a committee of Canada's Privy Council began to investigate possible designs for a new flag, to better represent an independent Canada. Later, in 1946, a select parliamentary committee was appointed with a similar mandate and examined more than 2,600 submissions. Agreement on a new design was not reached, and it was not until the 1960s, with the centennial of Canadian self-rule approaching, that the Canadian Parliament intensified its efforts to choose a new flag. In December of 1964, Parliament voted to adopt a new design. Canada's national flag was to be red and white, the official colours of Canada as decided by King George V of Britain in 1921, with a stylised eleven-point red maple leaf in its centre. The new flag was proclaimed by Queen Elizabeth II
1971 Britain switched to a system of decimal currency from pounds, shillings and pence, after 1200 years of sterling
1980 In New York, Iran officially complained to the UN that Canada had abused diplomatic privilege by smuggling six Americans out of Iran using diplomatic passports. Canadian embassy officials in Tehran had hidden the six Americans from Iranian militants for more than two months after the US embassy was seized by Iranian revolutionaries. The previous November, student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini sent shock waves across the US when they stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, taking some ninety hostages, fifty-two of whom were held for 444 days
1982 A huge oil-drilling rig, the Ocean Ranger, capsized and sank off the coast of Newfoundland. In the predawn darkness, the Ocean Ranger's entire crew of 84 men was lost in the midst of a fierce storm that produced swells as tall as seven-storey buildings. It was the worst marine disaster in Canada since World War II. At the height of the storm, the console that controlled the rig's ballast system was soaked by a wave that punched through the thin glass in a porthole, causing short circuits. The problem would have been easy to fix if the crew knew what they were doing. Instead, a cascade of snafus caused the football-field-size platform to pitch forward in heavy seas. Things only got worse when the panicked crew headed for the lifeboats, when shoddy training and inadequate equipment undermined the evacuation. Most of the crew were dressed in light clothing and some were still in their pyjamas. One badly damaged lifeboat couldn't be retrieved from the water when a supply ship arrived at the scene. In Canada, a Royal Commission spent two years investigating the tragedy, concluding that the semi-submersible rig, then the world's largest, was plagued by design flaws and that the crew was poorly trained. The commission called on governments and the oil industry to make sweeping changes to prevent another calamity on the high seas. Rigs had to be redesigned, rescue equipment upgraded and training intensified. A year after the disaster, a US inquiry into the sinking of the Ocean Ranger released its report. It said the rig's US owners had failed to provide adequate training and safety equipment
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