1765 Joseph Nicéphore Niepce - French chemist who was the first to make a permanent photographic image in the summer of 1827. He called his image a Heliograph. He teamed up with Louis Daguerre in 1829, a partnership which lasted until his death four years later. Daguerre continued Niepce's pioneering work, leading to the daguerreotype, a forerunner of modern photography
1792 John Herschel - British mathematician and astronomer. He studied at Cambridge with Charles Babbage, the pioneer of the computer. Babbage and Herschel realised that England lagged behind other modern nations in the realm of mathematics, and together they cofounded England's Analytical Society. The Analytical Society helped bring English mathematics up to date by introducing a streamlined system to denote numbers and operations
1802 Sir Edwin Henry Landseer - British painter who was renowned as one of the best animal painters of his time. Interestingly, his most familiar works are not paintings at all, but sculptures of the huge lions in Trafalgar Square, London
1849 Luther Burbank - US horticulturist and naturalist. Born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Burbank was brought up on a farm and received only an elementary education. At age 21 he purchased a 17-acre tract near Lunenberg, Massachusetts, and began a 55-year plant breeding career. In 1871 he developed the Burbank potato, which was introduced in Ireland to help combat the blight epidemic. He sold the rights to the Burbank potato for $150, which he used to travel to Santa Rosa, California. In Santa Rosa, he established a nursery garden, greenhouse, and experimental farms that have become famous throughout the world. During Burbank's career, his four-acre garden in Santa Rosa was an outdoor laboratory where he carried out his horticultural work, conducting the plant-breeding experiments that brought him world renown. His objective was to manipulate the characteristics of plants, improving their quality, and thereby increase the world's food supply. In his working career Burbank introduced more than 800 new varieties of plants including over 200 varieties of fruits, many vegetables, nuts and grains, and hundreds of ornamental flowers. He developed the Freestone peach, and an improved spineless cactus which could be grown in desert regions and provide forage for livestock. Burbank was a friend of both Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. In California, Burbank's birthday is celebrated as Arbour Day and trees are planted in his memory
1875 Maurice Joseph Ravel - French composer (Bolero, Daphnis et Chloé, The Child and the Enchantments, Le Tombeau de Couperin)
1908 Anna Magnani - Italian actress (The Rose Tattoo, The Miracle, The Fugitive Kind, Bellissimo: Images of the Italian Cinema)
1917 Lee Young - Jazz musician and drummer with the Nat King Cole Trio and the Lee Young Band
1923 Mahlon Clark - Musician with Lawrence Welk's band
1925 Richard Vernon – British actor (The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Gandhi, The Sandbaggers, Hadleigh, Goldfinger)
1926 Alan Sues – Actor (Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, Oh Heavenly Dog!, The Americanization of Emily)
1927 James Broderick - Actor (Alice's Restaurant, Dog Day Afternoon, Family) He’s the father of actor Matthew Broderick
1930 Anthony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon - British photographer and former husband of Princess Margaret
1934 Willard Scott - TV weatherman (Today Show) He was the first Ronald McDonald
1938 Janice Guthrie - Auto racer. She was the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500
1940 Daniel J. Travanti - Actor (Hill Street Blues, Weep No More My Lady, Adam) He played Barney Austin in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Midnight Howler
1942 Tammy Faye Bakker - Gospel singer, TV evangelist who was once married to PTL Club founder Jim Bakker
1944 Sir Ranulph Fiennes – British explorer who, in 1993 with Dr. Michael Stroud, became the first to cross the Antarctic on foot without outside support. He is the cousin of acting brothers Joseph and Ralph Fiennes
1945 John Heard - Actor (The Pelican Brief, Radio Flyer, Home Alone, Rambling Rose, The Milagro Beanfield War, Big)
1946 Peter Wolf - Singer with the J. Geils Band (Centrefold, Lights Out, Freeze-Frame)
1946 Matthew Fisher - British rock musician with Procol Harum (A Whiter Shade of Pale, Conquistador) and solo (Journey's End, I'll be There, Matthew Fisher, Strange Days) He had received classical music training at Britain's Guildhall School of Music
1956 Bryan Cranston – Actor (Malcolm in the Middle, Little Miss Sunshine, Saving Private Ryan, Breaking Bad, Drive, Little Miss Sunshine)
1958 Rik Mayall - British comedian and actor (Drop Dead Fred, The Canterville Ghost, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Murder Room: The White Knight Stratagem) He has also guested on the British series Blackadder, French and Saunders and Jonathan Creek, among others
1970 Rachel Weisz – British actress (The Mummy, Page Eight, The Constant Gardener, About a Boy, Enemy at the Gates, The Favourite) She played Arabelle Baydon in the Inspector Morse episode Twilight of the Gods
1980 Laura Prepon – Actress (That 70’s Show, Are You There Chelsea?, October Road, Karla)
Died this Day
1274 St. Thomas Aquinas, age 48 - Theologian, and the patron of all Catholic schools
1913 Emily Pauline Johnson – Canadian poet (The Song My Paddle Sings, The Pilot of the Plains, The Wolf, Shadow River) She died three days before her 52nd birthday
1971 Stevie Smith - British poet (A Good Time Was Had By All, Not Waving But Drowning)
1985 Victor Farris - US inventor who held more than 200 patents, including one for paper milk cartons
1999 Stanley Kubrick, age 70 - Director (2001: A Space Odyssey, Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Paths of Glory)
2000 Charles Gray, age 71 - British actor (Diamonds Are Forever, You Only Live Twice, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Mirror Crack'd, Longitude) He also played Sherlock Holmes' brother, Mycroft, in both the movie The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and in the Granada TV series with Jeremy Brett
2004 Paul Winfield, age 62 – Actor (Julia, Sounder, King, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Terminator, Roots: The Next Generation, Cliffhanger, City Confidential) He played Mitch in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Runaway Racer
On this Day
1530 The Pope refused King Henry VIII his request for a divorce
1657 The sale of liquor to the aboriginal people in New France was prohibited by Louis XIV
1774 The British closed the port of Boston to all commerce
1778 Captain James Cook first sighted the Oregon coast at Yaquina Bay
1800 Hull, Quebec was founded by Philemon Wright. It was originally named Wrightstown
1801 Massachusetts enacted the first state voter registration law
1804 Britain's Royal Horticultural Society was founded by John Wedgewood, son of the pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgewood
1838 Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, made her debut at the Stockholm Opera in Der Freischutz
1850 In a speech to the US Senate, Daniel Webster endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a means of preserving the Union
1854 In the US, Charles Miller patented a sewing machine to stitch buttonholes
1866 Canada put 10,000 militia on alert as precaution against anticipated attacks on St. Patrick's Day, after Fenians holding a meeting in New York threatened invasion
1867 The New Brunswick legislature rejected Confederation with Canada. They were angling for better terms, and the Intercolonial Railway
1876 In the US, twenty-nine-year-old Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for the first telephone capable of sustained, articulate speech. His invention was the result of his work with the deaf. Three days after receiving the patent, issued for "improvements to the telegraph," Bell made the first successful telephone call, to another floor in his house. The following fall, he completed the first call over outdoor wires, from Boston to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bell's patent was hotly contested by several lawsuits, but the courts ultimately upheld his claims. He continued to improve the telephone and also invented a number of other devices, including the graphophone, an early voice recording device, in 1887; the photophone, which transmitted sound using light beams, in 1880; and various hydrofoils and other aviation devices. He founded the Bell Telephone Company in 1877
1911 Willis Farnworth of Petaluma, California patented the coin-operated locker
1912 French aviator Henri Seimet became the first to fly non-stop from Paris to London. The flight took three hours
1912 Captain Roald Amundsen formally announced that he had discovered the South Pole on December 14th, 1911
1917 The US Victor Company issued the world's first jazz record, The Dixie Jazz Band One-step. A previous recording by Columbia in January was thought not worthy, and was never released
1926 The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation took place, between New York City and London
1933 In New York, CBS Radio premiered Marie The Little French Princess. It was the first daytime radio serial, and had a successful run of two years
1939 Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians recorded their signature tune, Auld Lang Syne, for Decca Records in New York City
1955 Comedienne Phyllis Diller made her stage debut at the Purple Onion, in San Francisco
1962 At Cape Canaveral, Florida, NASA launched the OSO 1. It was the first astronomy satellite designed to collect solar flare data
1963 The FLQ (Front de Liberation du Québec) began its campaign of violence by hurling Molotov cocktails at three Canadian Armed Forces armouries
1965 Roman Catholic churches in Canada celebrated Mass in English or French for the first time, rather than the traditional Latin
1989 A convicted murderer in Columbia, South Carolina, who had successfully won an appeal against execution by the electric chair, was electrocuted accidentally while sitting on the toilet trying to repair a pair of earphones
1990 The US announced a more informative food-labelling system that required the disclosure of the fat, fibre and cholesterol content of nearly all packaged foods
1994 The US Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered "fair use" that doesn't require permission from the copyright holder
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