1527 Philip II - King of Spain, who, in 1588 tried to conquer England, but sent his ill-fated Armada to destruction
1527 Abraham Oertel - Dutch cartographer and engraver who produced the first atlas
1629 Christiaan Huygens - Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist. Among his accomplishments, he built the first pendulum clock, discovered the ring and fourth satellite of Saturn (on Galileo's suggestion), improved the waterpump, discovered polarisation and developed the micrometer
1827 Augustus Pitt-Rivers - British archaeologist who is called the Father of British Archaeology
1866 Anne Sullivan Macy - US teacher who helped educate the blind, deaf and mute Helen Keller
1879 James Branch Cabell - US novelist (Jurgen, The Eagle's Shadow, The Soul of Melicent)
1889 Arnold Toynbee - British historian who wrote the 12-volume Study of History. He coined the phrase "Industrial Revolution" in his book covering that period of British history
1904 Sir John Gielgud - British actor (Becket, Arthur, Chariots of Fire, The Elephant Man, Ghandi, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, A Man for All Seasons, Murder on the Orient Express, War & Remembrance) He played Lord Hinksey in the Inspector Morse episode Twilight of the Gods He also played Lord Salisbury in the Sherlock Holmes movie, Murder by Decree
1925 Rod Steiger - Actor (In the Heat of the Night, On the Waterfront, The Pawnbroker, Dr. Zhivago, The Longest Day, Back Water, In Pursuit of Honour)
1930 Bradford Dillman - Actor (Compulsion, The Bridge at Remagen, The Way We Were, Court-Martial, King's Crossing, Falcon Crest)
1933 Buddy Knox - Singer (Party Doll, Rock Your Little Baby to Sleep, Hula Love, Somebody Touched Me)
1935 Loretta Lynn - Country singer (Coal Miner's Daughter, I'm a Honky-Tonk Girl, One's on the Way)
1941 Julie Christie – Indian-born British actress (Dr. Zhivago, Petulia, Shampoo, Separate Tables, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Fahrenheit 451, Billy Liar, Darling, Finding Neverland, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Troy, Karaoke)
1945 Ritchie Blackmore - British rock musician with Deep Purple (Smoke on the Water, Lazy, Highway Star, Hush)
1958 Peter Capaldi – Scottish actor (Doctor Who, Bean, The Thick of It, Torchwood: Children of the Earth, In the Loop, Fortysomething, Mrs. Caldicot’s Cabbage War, Prime Suspect 3, The Cloning of Joanna May, Poirot: Wasp’s Nest, The Lair of the White Worm)
1961 Robert Carlyle – Scottish actor (Angela's Ashes, The Full Monty, Hamish MacBeth, Trainspotting, The World is Not Enough, Once Upon a Time, SGU Stargate Universe, Human Trafficking, The Last Enemy, Gunpowder Treason & Plot)
1964 Bob Clendenin – Actor (Cougartown, The Closer, 10 Items or Less)
1968 Anthony Michael Hall – Actor (National Lampoon’s Vacation, Weird Science, The Breakfast Club, Saturday Night Live, Edward Scissorhands, Six Detrees of Separation, The Dead Zone, The Dark Knight)
1973 Adrien Brody – Actor (The Pianist, Summer of Sam, The Thin Red Line, The Jacket, Midnight in Paris, Hollywoodland)
1977 Sarah Michelle Gellar - Actress (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I Know What You Did Last Summer, High Stakes, Ringer, The Grudge, Scooby-Doo, Cruel Intentions)
1993 Graham Phillips – Actor (The Good Wife, Evan Almighty, Stolen Lives, The Ten Commandments: The Musical)
1996 Abigail Breslin – Actress (Little Miss Sunshine, Signs, My Sister’s Keeper, No Reservations, Raising Helen)
Died this Day
1759 George Frideric Handel, age 74 - German composer (Messiah, Rinaldo, Water Music) He had previously had a stroke and gone blind, and died in London where most of his music making had been accomplished
1965 Robert E. Hickok and Perry E. Smith - Convicted murderers who were hanged at Kansas State Penitentiary for the killing of the Clutter family, which was the subject of Truman Capote's book, In Cold Blood
1995 Burl Ives, age 83 – Actor (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, East of Eden, The Big Country, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer) and folk-singer (Wayfarin’ Stranger, Polly Wolly Doodle, Blue Tail Fly) He died in Anacortes, Washington
1999 Anthony Newley, age 67 – British actor (Stop the World, I Want to Get Off, Roar of the Grease Paint, Oliver Twist, No Time to Die, The Blue Peter, Doctor Dolittle, EastEnders) and singer (What Kind of Fool Am I?) He died in Jensen Beach, Florida
On this Day
AD 73 Rather than face defeat at the hands of the Romans, Jews in the fortress of Masada committed mass suicide
1612 Thomas Button sailed Henry Hudson's old ship, the Discovery, into Hudson Bay to search for Hudson's remains. Button discovered the Nelson River and wintered there, calling the territory New Wales
1775 The first US society for the abolition of slavery was organised by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush
1828 The first edition of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language was published. Webster was a Yale-educated lawyer with an avid interest in language and education. His dictionary, one of the first lexicons to include distinctly American words, took him more than two decades to complete and introduced more than 10,000 "Americanisms"
1865 President Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded by actor, and Confederate sympathiser, John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln died the next day. The attack came only five days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the US Civil War. Booth, who remained in the North during the war despite his Confederate sympathies, initially plotted to capture President Lincoln in March, and take him to Richmond, the Confederate capital, but on the day of the planned kidnapping, the President failed to appear at the spot where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait. In April, with Confederate armies near collapse across the South, Booth hatched a desperate plan to save the Confederacy, plotting the simultaneous assassination of Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William H. Seward and thereby hoping to throw the US government into a paralysing disarray. On the evening of April 14, conspirator Lewis T. Powell burst into Secretary of State Seward's home, seriously wounding him and three others, while George A. Atzerodt, assigned to Vice President Johnson, lost his nerve and fled. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, just after 10 PM, Booth entered Lincoln's private box unnoticed at Ford's Theatre during a performance of the comedy, Our American Cousin, and shot the President with a single bullet in the back of his head. Slashing an army officer who rushed at him, Booth jumped to the stage and is generally believed to have shouted "Sic semper tyrannis! (Thus always to tyrants), the South is avenged!" Although Booth had broken his left leg jumping from Lincoln's box, he succeeded in escaping Washington. The president, mortally wounded, was carried to a cheap lodging house opposite Ford's Theatre. Booth, pursued by the army and secret service forces, was finally cornered in a barn near Bowling Green, Virginia, and died from a possibly self-inflicted bullet wound as the barn was burned to the ground
1869 In Ottawa, the noon cannon on Parliament Hill fired for the first time
1871 Parliament passed a bill to create a uniform currency throughout Canada. The Act set the denominations of currency as dollars, cents and mills
1892 The city of Windsor, Ontario was incorporated
1894 Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope first appeared in a New York City arcade. The peep-show film machines accommodated only one viewer at a time and showed short films of entertainers like Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill
1902 J.C. Penney opened his first store, called The Golden Rule, in Kemmerer, Wyoming
1903 Dr. Harry Plotz discovered the typhus vaccine, in New York
1906 The term "muckraking" entered the language when President Roosevelt criticised the press for writing about business ethics, or the lack of them. He quoted Bunyan, "…never looking at the stars, but steadily plied his rake in the muck"
1912 The British liner RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg south of Newfoundland's Grand Banks in the North Atlantic and began sinking, four days after departing on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England. The luxury liner sank into the North Atlantic, in less than three hours, early the next morning. Just before midnight, the RMS Titanic, one of the largest and most luxurious ocean liners ever built, failed to divert its course from an iceberg, which grazed the ship's side, popping iron rivets and shearing off a fatal number of hull plates below the waterline. Five of the Titanic's sixteen allegedly watertight compartments were ruptured along its starboard side. Because of a shortage of lifeboats and the lack of satisfactory emergency procedures, over 1,500 people went down in the sinking ship or froze to death in the icy waters. Of the 700 or so survivors, most were women and children. A number of notable US and British citizens died in the tragedy, leading to outrage on both sides of the Atlantic when the circumstances of the disaster were revealed. The sinking of the Titanic did have some positive effects, however, as more stringent safety regulations were adopted on public ships and regular patrols were initiated to trace the locations of Atlantic icebergs
1939 John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, was first published
1950 The British comic strip hero Dan Dare, drawn by Frank Hampson, made his first appearance in the first edition of the Eagle
1956 The Ampex Corporation demonstrated its first commercial videotape recorder
1981 The first test flight of the US's first operational space shuttle, the Columbia, ended successfully with a landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California
1983 The first cordless phone, capable of operating up to 600 feet away from its base, was introduced. It was made by Fidelity and British Telcom, and sold for £170
1986 Nobel peace prize winner Desmond Tutu was elected Anglican Archbishop of South Africa. He became the first black head of the church in South Africa
1989 Police in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England revealed that violent prisoners were being put into a bright pink cell which seemed to have a calming effect. The colour was named Baker-Miller Pink, after the police chief and psychologist who thought up the idea
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