1506 St. Francis Xavier - Spanish Roman Catholic missionary, who was ordained in Venice
1770 William Wordsworth - British Romantic poet (Tintern Abbey, Intimations of Immortality, The Prelude, The Waggoner, Lyrical Ballads) He was born near England's Lake District. He lost his mother when he was eight, and his father died five years later. Wordsworth attended Cambridge, then travelled in Europe, taking long walking tours with friends through the mountains. During his 20s, Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy. In 1802, after years of living on a modest income, Wordsworth came into a long-delayed inheritance from his father and was able to live comfortably with his sister. He married their long-time neighbour Mary Hutchinson and had five children. The poet's stature grew steadily, although most of his major work was written by 1807. He was the poet laureate of England from 1843 until his death in 1850
1860 W. K. Kellogg - US industrialist and founder of the W.K. Kellogg Company
1891 Ole Kirk Christiansen - Danish toy maker who, in 1932, formed the company Lego, from the Danish leg godt which means 'play well'. After seeing his Lego bricks become one of the most successful toys of all time, Christiansen later discovered that Lego is also Latin for 'I put together'
1897 Walter Winchell - US journalist, vaudeville performer, gossip columnist (New York Mirror) radio commentator ("Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea")
1908 Percy Faith – Canadian-born orchestra leader, composer (Theme from A Summer Place, My Heart Cries for You, Delicado, Song from Moulin Rouge, Theme for Young Lovers)
1915 Billie Holiday - Jazz and blues singer known as 'Lady Day' (Night and Day, The Man I Love, Lover Man, They Can't Take that Away from Me, Fine and Mellow, Don't Explain, Strange Fruit, God Bless the Child) She was born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore
1917 Mongo Santamaría - Bandleader, composer, musician on the conga drums (Afro Blue, Watermelon Man)
1918 Ronald Howard – British actor (The Lotus Eaters, Run a Crooked Mile, Murder She Said) He portrayed Sherlock Holmes in the 1954 TV series . He was the son of actor Leslie Howard
1920 Ravi Shankar - Indian sitar player who introduced Indian music to modern Western audiences. He played at Woodstock in 1969 and with George Harrison in the Bangla-Desh Benefit concerts in 1971. He is the father of singer Norah Jones
1928 James Garner - Actor (Rockford Files, Maverick, The Americanization of Emily, Victor/Victoria, Tank, A Man Called Sledge, Duel at Diablo, The Distinguished Gentleman, Space Cowboys, The Notebook, 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood)
1928 Alan J. Pakula - US film director (The Pelican Brief, Presumed Innocent, Sophie's Choice, Starting Over, All the President's Men, Klute)
1930 Andrew Sachs - German born British actor (What's Up Nurse, Revenge of the Pink Panther, The History of the World: Part I, The Mystery of Edwin Drood) He is best known for his role as Manuel, the down trodden Spanish waiter in the British series, Fawlty Towers. He also portrays Dr. John H. Watson in the BBC radio productions of the Sherlock Holmes stories
1933 Wayne Rogers - Actor (M*A*S*H, Cool Hand Luke, Passion in Paradise, Pocket Money, The Killing Time, Chiefs, The Gig)
1934 Ian Richardson - Scottish born actor (House of Cards, To Play the King, The Final Cut, The Man of La Mancha, Brazil, Cry Freedom, The Canterville Ghost, Gormenghast, 102 Dalmatians, The Woman in White, Bleak House, Marple: The Body in the Library, Strange, From Hell, Dark City) He played Sherlock Holmes in the 1983 versions of The Sign of Four and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and he played Dr. Joseph Bell in Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
1935 Bobby Bare - Country singer (Detroit City, Shame on Me, 500 Miles Away from Home)
1939 Francis Ford Coppola - Director (The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Godfather Part III, Apocalypse Now, Finian's Rainbow, Peggy Sue Got Married)
1939 David Frost - British TV host (That Was The Week That Was, The David Frost Show)
1948 John Oates - Songwriter, singer with the duo Hall and Oates (She's Gone, Sara Smile, Rich Girl, I Can't Go For That, Private Eyes, Maneater)
1951 Janis Ian - Singer-songwriter (At Seventeen, Society's Child, Watercolours)
1952 Clarke Peters – Actor (The Wire, Treme, Endgame, Damages, The Corner, Death Train)
1954 Jackie Chan - Hong Kong born actor (Rumble in the Bronx, Jackie Chan's First Strike, Rush Hour, The Accidental Spy, Around the World in 80 Days, Shanghai Noon, 1911, The Forbidden Kingdom)
1964 Russell Crowe - New Zealand born, Australian raised actor (Gladiator, Proof of Life, L.A. Confidential, The Insider, The Quick and the Dead, Spottswood, The Brides of Christ, Neighbours, A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander, American Gangster, Cinderalla Man, For the Moment)
Died this Day
1739 Dick Turpin - Infamous British highwayman, hanged in York for the murder of an innkeeper in Epping
1868 Thomas D'Arcy McGee - Canadian Member of Parliament and Father of Confederation, who was one of the most brilliant orators in Canadian parliamentary history. He was shot and killed by a Fenian assassin outside his Ottawa lodging house, as he was turning the key in his lock after returning late from making a speech in Parliament. He had denounced the Fenians, a militant Irish-American group dedicated to securing Irish independence. He died 6 days before his 43rd birthday
1891 Phineas Taylor Barnum, age 80 - US showman who founded Barnum & Bailey's Circus, died in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Though he was gravely ill, the showman's sense of humour hadn't deserted him. He requested that a New York paper run his obituary before he died so he could enjoy reading it, and the paper obliged. Barnum died after spending his entire life revolutionising entertainment, popularising not just the circus but also museums and concerts as entertaining activities. His last words were reportedly, "Ask Bailey what the box office was at the Garden last night"
1947 Henry Ford, age 83 - US auto pioneer, died in Dearborn, Michigan. He was the first to use mass production techniques
1950 Walter Huston - Canadian born US actor (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Outlaw, The Virginian, Yankee Doodle Dandy) He died three days after his 66th birthday
1961 Marian Jordan - Co-star of the long-running radio show Fibber McGee and Molly. Marian and her husband, Jim Jordan, married in 1918 in their hometown of Peoria, Illinois, and spent six years as struggling singers and vaudeville performers. One night in Chicago in 1924, the Jordans heard a radio singer and were convinced they could do better. They went straight to the station and persuaded the programmer to let them sing. After the show, they signed their first radio contract. During the next few years, they starred in several radio programs and, in 1935, launched Fibber McGee and Molly, a show about an incessant teller of tall tales and his wife. The show became the top-rated radio program in the nation in 1943 and stayed at or near the top for the rest of the decade. The show remained on the air until 1959
On this Day
1827 The first practical, strike-anywhere, friction matches were sold. They were invented by John Walker, a chemist in Stockton-on-Tees Company in Durham, England. The first known purchaser was a local solicitor who paid one shilling for 100 matches and a further two pennies for the tin tube in which to store them. Walker used three-inch splints of wood, tipped with potassium chlorate, antimony sulphide, and gum arabic. The match head was ignited by drawing it through a fold of fine glasspaper. By 1829, similar matches called "Lucifers" were sold throughout London. Their difference was added sulphur to aid combustion, and white phosphorus. Matchmaking workers quickly developed a bone disease called "phossy jaw" from the phosphorus. Phosphorus sesquisulphide replaced the deadly white phosphorus in the strike-anywhere match during the early twentieth century
1832 Joseph Thompson, a farmer, came to Carlisle to sell his wife, both having agreed to part. A large crowd gathered as he offered her for 50 shillings. After an hour, the price was knocked down to 20 shillings, and a Newfoundland dog was thrown in. The practice of wife selling, although illegal in Britain, was not unknown in rural areas
1869 In Charlottetown, the last public hanging in Prince Edward Island took place
1902 The Texas Oil Company, or Texaco, was formed
1906 Mount Vesuvius erupted, killing more than 100 people
1927 Employees at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City gathered to watch a 2-by-3 inch image of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover reading a speech in Washington, DC. Hoover read the speech into a telephone so viewers could both see and hear him. The image was transmitted at eighteen images per second, and was the first successful long-distance demonstration of television
1943 Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was first synthesised by Albert Hoffman in his Swiss laboratory
1948 The World Health Organisation was founded in Geneva
1949 The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, South Pacific, opened on Broadway
1956 Arthur Hailey had his radio script, Flight into Danger, accepted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Hailey later wrote the best-selling novel, Airport
1957 The last of New York City's electric trolleys completed its final run, from Queens to Manhattan
1966 The US recovered a hydrogen bomb it had lost off the coast of Spain
1969 The Montréal Expos had their first game at Jarry Park and beat St. Louis Cardinals 8-7. It marked the first regular season major league baseball game outside the US
1977 The Toronto Blue Jays played their inaugural regular season game. Despite a light snowfall in Toronto, they beat the Chicago White Sox 9-5
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