1494 Georgius Agricola - German scholar and scientist who was known as the "Father of Mineralogy"
1834 William Morris - British designer, craftsman and poet , who, in association with the Pre-Raphealites, changed house decoration and furnishings in England
1855 Andrew Mellon - US financier, philanthropist and Secretary of the Treasury
1874 Harry Houdini - Hungarian born magician, escape artist, and an exposer of spiritualist frauds. He was born Eric Weiss, and was the son of a rabbi. He did not take the name Houdini until he had been a performer for many years. At the age of 9 he joined a travelling circus, touring Wisconsin as a contortionist and trapeze performer. The Davenport brothers were then famous, doing a trick where they would ring bells while bound inside a cabinet and would agree to free themselves from any bonds. This inspired Houdini to a somewhat similar performance. Standing in the middle of the ring, he would invite any one to tie him with ropes and would then free himself inside the cabinet. In Kansas, a Sheriff tied him and then produced a pair of handcuffs with the taunt: "If I put these on you, you'll never get loose." Houdini, still only a boy, told him to go ahead, and eventually emerged, carrying the handcuffs in his free hands. That was the beginning of his long series of escapes from every known sort of manacle. Houdini had become internationally known as a tireless enemy and exposer of fraudulent mediums and all false claims in the field of spiritualism. It was this campaigning that ultimately ended his friendship with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a great believer in spiritualism
1887 Fatty Arbuckle - US silent film actor and comedian (The Lizzies of Mack Sennett, Mabel and Fatty, Keystone Comedies with Charlie Chaplin) In 1921 he was accused in a sex scandal, and although he was acquitted by the courts, it ruined his career and he never worked again
1890 Agnes Macphail - Canada's first female Member of Parliament. She was elected in 1921, the first federal election in which women had the vote
1901 Ub Iwerks - US animator who played a key role in the creation of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse
1909 Clyde Barrow - US robber of "Bonnie & Clyde" fame
1910 Richard Conte - Actor (I'll Cry Tomorrow, The Godfather, Hotel, A Walk in the Sun, They Came to Cordura, Ocean’s 11)
1911 Joseph Barbera – Cartoon director and producer (Tom & Jerry, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo Where Are You?, Samson & Goliath, Space Ghost, The Atom Ant Show, Jonny Quest, Yogi Bear, Magilla Gorilla, Top Cat, Quick Draw McGraw, Pixie & Dixie, The Smurfs, The Huckleberry Hound Show) He worked with William Hanna
1915 Gorgeous George (George Raymond Wagner) – Professional wrestler who was one of the early stars of TV wrestling
1920 Gene Nelson - Actor, dancer (Lullaby of Broadway, Oklahoma, Tea for Two, The West Point Story, The Atomic Man)
1922 Dave Appell - Singer, musician, songwriter (In the Midnight Hour)
1924 Norman Fell - Actor (Three's Company, The Graduate, Pork Chop Hill)
1928 Vanessa Brown - Actress (The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Three Husbands, The Fighter, Witch Who Came from the Sea)
1930 Steve McQueen - Actor (The Blob, The Great Escape, The Magnificent Seven, Papillon, Towering Inferno, The Sand Pebbles, Love with the Proper Stranger, Hell is for Heroes, Bullitt, The Hunter, Le Mans)
1933 William Smith - Actor (Rich Man Poor Man, Eye of the Tiger, Red Dawn, Going My Way, The Song of Bernadette, Laredo, Conan the Barbarian)
1936 David Suzuki - Canadian scientist and broadcaster (Suzuki on Science, Quirks and Quarks, The Nature of Things)
1940 Bob Mackie - Fashion and costume designer
1944 R. Lee Ermey – Actor (Full Metal Jacket, Se7en, Solstice, Man of the House, The Frighteners, Dead Man Walking, On Deadly Ground, Toy Soldiers, Mississippi Burning) He was in the U.S. Marine Corps for 11 years achieving the rank of Staff Sergeant
1945 Patrick Malahide – British actor (Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, Poirot: Five Little Pigs, Victoria & Albert, All the King's Men, The World Is Not Enough, U.S. Marshals, Middlemarch, The Killing Fields, Minder, Sweeney 2, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The 39 Steps) He played Jeremy Boynton in the Inspector Morse episode Driven to Distraction He also played Mason in The Sweeney episode Drag Act
1952 Nicholas Campbell – Canadian actor (Da Vinci’s Inquest, Cinderella Man, Human Cargo, We All Fall Down, Butterbox Babies, Bordertown Café, Shadow of the Wolf, The Dead Zone, Haven, Republic of Doyle, The Border)
1953 Louie Anderson - Comedian-actor (Life with Louie, The Louie Show)
1954 Donna Pescow - Actress (Saturday Night Fever, Policewoman Centrefold, Glory Years)
1954 Robert Carradine - Actor (Revenge of the Nerds, Lizzie McGuire, Monte Walsh, Ghosts of Mars, Escape from L.A., Orca) He is the son of John Carradine, and brother of David and Keith
1960 Kelly LeBrock - Actress (The Woman in Red, Weird Science)
1964 Annabella Sciorra – Actress (Jungle Fever, Cop Land, Romeo Is Bleeding, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Reversal of Fortune, Cadillac Man, Queens Supreme, Above Suspicion)
1970 Lara Flynn Boyle – Actress (The Practice, Men in Black II, The Road to Wellville, Wayne's World, Twin Peaks, Dead Poets Society, Shades of Black: The Conrad Black Story, Las Vegas)
1973 Jim Parsons – Actor (The Big Bang Theory, Garden State, Judging Amy, The Big Year)
1974 Alyson Hannigan – Actress (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, How I Met Your Mother, Date Movie, American Pie, My Stepmother is an Alien)
Died this Day
1603 Elizabeth I, age 69 - Queen of England for 44 years. Elizabeth encouraged voyages of discovery, such as Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the world, and Sir Walter Raleigh's expeditions to the North American coast. The long reign of Elizabeth, who became known as the "Virgin Queen" for her reluctance to endanger her authority through marriage, also coincided with the flowering of the English Renaissance, associated with such renowned authors as William Shakespeare. By her death, England had become a major world power in every respect, and Queen Elizabeth I passed into history as one of England's greatest monarchs
1776 John Harrison - British watchmaker and inventor of the marine chronometer. He died the week before his 83rd birthday. He was the subject of A&E's "Longitude"
1882 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - US poet (The Song of Hiawatha, Paul Revere's Ride, The Wreck of the Hesperus)
1905 Jules Verne, age 77 - French author and science fiction pioneer (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days)
1918 Chung Ling-soo (William E. Robinson) - US magician who died from a gunshot wound received the previous evening during a performance. He was about to perform his "Defying Bullets" trick which required him to "catch" two bullets fired at him from separate guns. Because of a mechanical failure of one of the guns, the bullet was actually discharged and pierced his lung. Despite his wound, he still managed to cry, "Lower the curtain"
1953 Queen Mary - Wife of Britain's King George V, and grandmother of Queen Elizabeth II
1976 Bernard, Viscount Montgomery, age 88 - British Army Field Marshall. His most famous victory, the defeat of the Afrika Korps under Nazi General Rommel at El Alamein, was considered a turning point in the Second World War
On this Day
1580 What are believed to have been the first bombs, were tossed at the town of Guelderland, Germany
1603 James I, son of Mary Queen of Scots, united the English and Scottish crowns when he ascended the throne upon the death of Elizabeth I
1634 The first Roman Catholic Mass in English North America was celebrated at St. Mary's, Maryland
1670 King Louis XIV of France ordered 100,000 livres of silver and copper coins to be minted for New France (Canada)
1761 The first Lutheran church in Canada was established in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by German soldiers and settlers
1765 Britain enacted the Quartering Act, requiring American colonists to provide temporary housing to British soldiers
1786 The British government prohibited trade between British North America and the US
1837 Lower Canada gave black men the right to vote
1877 The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race ended in a dead heat for the first and only time
1882 German bacteriologist Robert Koch announced he had isolated the bacillus of tuberculosis. His work helped diagnose TB in animals intended for food
1883 Long-distance telephone service was inaugurated between Chicago and New York City
1900 Work began on the New York City subway system
1926 Marian B. Skaggs started the first Safeway's supermarket, in Maryland
1939 Basil Rathbone made his first appearance as Sherlock Holmes, in The Hound of the Baskervilles, which opened at the Roxy in New York. Rathbone, with Nigel Bruce playing Dr. Watson, starred in 14 Sherlock Holmes movies in the 1940s
1945 Canadian troops began the liberation of the Netherlands during the Second World War
1955 The Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, opened on Broadway
1958 Elvis Presley was inducted into the US Army in Memphis, Tennessee. Although he had been drafted the previous December, the army granted him a deferral so he could finish shooting his film, King Creole
1965 Robert F. Kennedy reached the top of Mount Kennedy in the Yukon Territory. The mountain was named by the Canadian government in honour of the Senator's late brother, President John F. Kennedy. Robert Kennedy was the first person on official record to scale the mountain
1970 The Canadian government banned commercial fishing on Lake St. Clair, and the sale of pickerel and perch from western Lake Erie because of mercury contamination
1978 The tanker, Amoco Cadiz, split in two off Brittany, spilling 50-thousand tons of crude oil which polluted the French coastline
1989 The worst oil spill in US history occurred as the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound and began leaking 11-million gallons of crude
1996 US astronaut Shannon Lucid safely transferred to the Russian space station Mir from the US space shuttle Atlantis. Lucid, a biochemist, conducted scientific experiments during her stay. She was the first female US astronaut to live in a space station, and her 188-day sojourn aboard Mir set a new space endurance record for an American, and a world endurance record for a woman
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