1786 Marc Séguin, The Elder - French engineer and inventor of the wire-cable suspension bridge and the tubular steam-engine boiler. Séguin was a nephew of Joseph Montgolfier, the pioneer balloonist. He developed an early interest in machinery, and by 1822, was studying the strength of wire cables. Séguin and his brother Camille studied the principles of the suspension bridge, at that time built with chain cables. In 1824, they built a bridge suspended from cables of parallel wire strands over the Rhône River at Tournon, the first such bridge, then copied around the world. Séguin also improved locomotive efficiency with his invention of the multiple fire-tube boiler, in place of the water-tube boiler used by the earlier steam engines. The brothers collaborated in the construction of the first French railroad
1798 Sir William Edmond Logan – Canadian geologist, was born in Montreal. Logan was Canada's foremost geologist of the 19th Century. Mount Logan in the Yukon, Canada’s highest mountain, is named after him
1850 Daniel Chester - US sculptor whose works included Lincoln's Memorial
1889 Adolf Hitler - Nazi dictator of Germany who led his country into World War II and was responsible for persecuting millions of Jews. He was born in Braunau, Austria
1893 Harold Lloyd - US film comedian (For Heaven's Sake, Feet First, Lonesome Luke)
1908 Lionel Hampton – Bandleader and composer (Flying Home, Evil Gal Blues, Midnight Sun, On the Sunny Side of the Street, Ba-Ba-Re-Bop, Rag Mop) He’s known as the King of the Vibes and played with Benny Goodman
1923 Tito Puente - Jazz musician, bandleader (Abanaquito, Para Los Rumberos, Jumpin' with Symphony Sid, Fancy Feet)
1924 Nina Foch - Actress (Scaramouche, Spartacus, The Ten Commandments, An American in Paris, Mahogany)
1926 Elena Verdugo - Actress (Little Giant, House of Frankenstein, Meet Millie, Marcus Welby MD)
1937 George Takei - Actor (Star Trek, The Green Berets, Mulan, The Magic Pearl, Kissinger and Nixon, Heroes) He was in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Blushing Pearls
1939 Johnny Tillotson - Singer (Poetry In Motion, It Keeps Right On A-Hurtin', Without You, Talk Back Trembling Lips)
1940 James Gammon – Actor (Nash Bridges, Jesse Stone: Sea Change, Altered, The Far Side of Jericho, Cold Mountain, The Man in the Iron Mask, Wild Bill, Wyatt Earp, The Milagro Beanfield War, Urban Cowboy)
1941 Ryan O'Neal - Actor (Love Story, Paper Moon, What's Up Doc?) He is the father of actress Tatum O'Neal
1945 Michael Brandon - Actor (Lovers and Other Strangers, Rich and Famous, Promises in the Dark)
1948 Gregory Itzin – Actor (The Mentalist, 24, Covert Affairs, The Ides of March, Big Love, Law Abiding Citizen, Murder One)
1948 Craig Frost - Musician on keyboards with the group Grand Funk (We're an American Band, The Loco-Motion, Some Kind of Wonderful, Bad Time)
1949 Jessica Lange - Actress (Tootsie, American Horror Story, Blue Skies, Frances, King Kong, All That Jazz, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Big Fish, Blue Sky, Cape Fear, Feud)
1950 Veronica Cartwright – British-born actress (Alien, The Right Stuff, The Witches of Eastwick, Inside the Osmonds, , LA Law, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Daniel Boone, The Birds) She is the older sister of actress Angela Cartwright
1951 Luther Vandross - Singer, songwriter (Never Too Much, How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye)
1957 Geraint Wyn Davies – Welsh-born Canadian actor (Forever Knight, Black Harbour, ReGenesis, Murdoch Mysteries, 24, Slings and Arrows, Tracker, Trudeau, Airwolf)
1959 Clint Howard - Actor (Gentle Ben, Eat My Dust!, Nightshift, Apollo 13, Backdraft, Cocoon, Frost/Nixon, Austin Powers movies) He is the brother of actor/director Ron Howard
1961 Nicholas Lyndhurst - British actor (Only Fools and Horses, The Piglet Files, Butterflies, Bullshot, Gulliver's Travels, David Copperfield, Goodnight Sweetheart, The Two of Us, After You’ve Gone)
1964 Andy Sirkis – British actor (Little Dorrit, Burke and Hare, Inkheart, Einstein and Eddington, The Prestige, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Oliver Twist, Streetwise) He portrayed MEM O’Brien in the Kavanagh QC episode The Burning Deck
1964 Crispin Glover - Actor (Back to the Future, The Doors, Twister, Charlie’s Angels, Alice in Wonderland, The Donner Party, Beowulf, Nurse Betty)
1969 Rebecca Lacey – British actress (Monarch of the Glen, Casualty, Carry On Columbus, May to December) She played John Thaw’s daughter, Julie, in Home to Roost
1970 Shemar Moore – Actor (Criminal Minds, Quantico, Reversible Errors, The Young and the Restless, S.W.A.T.)
1976 Joseph Lawrence – Actor (Summer Rental, Adventures in Babysitting, Gimme A Break, Blossom, Melissa & Joey, Brotherly Love)
Died this Day
1769 Pontiac - Chief of the Ottawa Indians. He was murdered by an Illinois Indian. Six years earlier he had helped lead the Potawatomis, Ottawa, Hurons and Ojibwas in a rising against the British garrisons on the Great Lakes
1812 George Clinton, age 73 - The 4th Vice President of the US, died in Washington, becoming the first Vice President to die while in office
1883 Edouard Manet - French painter
1912 Abraham (Bram) Stoker, age 64 - Irish author (Dracula or The Un-dead, The Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, The Judge’s House, Jewel of the Seven Stars, The Mystery of the Sea) He was also a partner in running London’s Lyceum Theatre, which is mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes story The Sign of the Four
1963 Wilfred O'Neill, age 65 - Montreal night watchman, was killed by a terrorist bomb placed in a garbage container at the Montreal army recruiting centre. The bomb was the work of the Front de Libération du Quebec. O'Neill was the first victim of the FLQ
1992 Benny Hill, age 68 – British comedian and actor (The Benny Hill Show, The Italian Job, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines)
On this Day
1534 Jacques Cartier left St. Malo on his first voyage to Canada. He was commissioned by King François I to find passage to Asia and “lands where there is a great quantity of gold.” He made the crossing to Newfoundland in just 20 days. Cartier explored the Strait of Belle Isle, which he hoped was the beginning of a river leading to China. But after exploring the desolate Labrador coast, Cartier wrote in his diary, "I believe that this was the land God allotted to Cain"
1792 France declared war on Austria, marking the start of the French Revolutionary Wars
1836 The Territory of Wisconsin was established by the US Congress
1841 Edgar Allan Poe's story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, first appeared in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine. The tale is generally considered to be the first detective story. The story describes the extraordinary analytical power used by Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin to solve a series of murders in Paris, and is narrated by the detective's unnamed roommate
1902 Scientists Marie and Pierre Curie successfully isolated radioactive radium salts from the mineral pitchblende in their laboratory in Paris. In 1898, the Curies discovered the existence of the elements radium and polonium in their research of pitchblende
1902 Art Nouveau was introduced at an exhibition in Paris
1907 Fort William and Port Arthur, Ontario were incorporated as cities. In 1970, they merged to become Thunder Bay
1914 The Ludlow Massacre ended a bitter coal-miners' strike in Colorado, as militiamen attacked a tent colony of strikers, killing dozens of men, women, and children. Two companies of guardsmen attacked a tent colony of strikers near the town of Ludlow, home to about 1,000 men, women, and children. The attack began in the morning with a barrage of bullets fired into the tents. The miners retaliated with pistols and rifles. After a strike leader was killed while attempting to negotiate a truce, the strikers feared the attack would intensify. To stay safe from gunfire, women and children took cover in pits dug beneath the tents. At dusk, guardsmen moved down from the hills and set the tent colony on fire with torches, shooting at the families as they fled into the hills. The true carnage, however, was not discovered until the next day, when a telephone linesman discovered a pit under one of the tents filled with the burned remains of 11 children and 2 women. The conflict had begun the previous September when 11,000 miners in southern Colorado went on strike against the powerful Colorado Fuel & Iron Corporation to protest low pay, dangerous working conditions, and the company's autocratic dominance over the workers' lives. The CF&I, which was owned by the Rockefeller family and Standard Oil, responded to the strike by immediately evicting the miners and their families from company-owned shacks. The miners moved with their families to canvas tent colonies scattered around the nearby hills and continued to strike. When the evictions failed to end the strike, the Rockefeller interests at first hired private detectives, but when that also failed, they approached the governor of Colorado, who authorised the use of the National Guard if the Rockefellers agreed to pay their wages. At first, the strikers believed that the government had sent the National Guard to protect them, instead, they soon discovered that the militia was under orders to break the strike. Although the Ludlow Massacre outraged many, the tragedy did little to help the beleaguered Colorado miners and their families. Additional federal troops crushed the coal-miners' strike, and the miners failed to achieve recognition of their union or any significant improvement in their wages and working conditions. Sixty-six men, women, and children died during the strike. Not a single militiaman or private detective was charged with any crime
1934 The first Shirley Temple film, Stand Up and Cheer, opened in New York City
1940 RCA publicly demonstrated its new and powerful electron microscope
1949 Scientists at the Mayo Clinic announced they'd succeeded in synthesising a hormone found to be useful in treating rheumatoid arthritis. The substance was named cortisone
1957 The Westinghouse-Bettis nuclear power plant became the first commercial users of Formula Translator, or FORTRAN, soon to be the dominant computer language for scientific applications. FORTRAN was the first widely used high-level computer language. Developed by IBM, FORTRAN greatly simplified programming by translating simple English instructions into machine language, saving the programmer hundreds of steps. The Westinghouse-Bettis nuclear plant received FORTRAN when an unlabeled cardboard box of punch cards arrived at the computer centre. The company had been expecting a new programming language from IBM, so, although the cards came with no instructions, the company's programmers fed them into their mainframe computer. To their surprise, the program worked immediately, giving detailed diagnostic statements in plain English
1971 The US Supreme Court upheld the use of bussing to achieve racial desegregation in schools
1972 The manned lunar module from Apollo 16 landed on the moon
1973 Canada's second communications satellite, the Anik-II, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It was the world's first commercial satellite in orbit
1986 Pianist Vladimir Horowitz performed in the Soviet Union, 61 years after leaving his native country
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