Born this Day

1685 John Gay – British poet and playwright (Beggar’s Opera, Polly, The Wife of Bath)
1917 Lena Horne - Singer (Stormy Weather, Love Me or Leave Me) and actress (Cabin in the Sky, The Wiz, Death of a Gunfighter)
1917 Susan Hayward - Actress (I Want to Live, I'll Cry Tomorrow, Valley of the Dolls)
1928 June Valli - Singer (Crying in the Chapel, Your Hit Parade, Stop the Music, Unchained Melody, Apple Green)
1936 Nancy Dussault - Actress (Too Close for Comfort, The Ted Knight Show)
1936 Tony Musante - Actor (Judgement, Toma, Fatal Choice, The Grissom Gang, Breaking Up is Hard To Do)
1943 Florence Ballard – Singer with The Supremes (Baby Love, Stop! In the Name of Love, Come See About Me, You Can't Hurry Love, My World is Empty Without You, The Happening)
1948 Murray McLauchlan – Scottish born Canadian singer (Whisperin’ Rain, Try Walking Away, Farmer's Song)
1959 Vincent D'Onofrio - Actor (Men in Black, Full Metal Jacket, JFK, Dying Young, Adventures in Babysitting, Law & Order: Criminal Intent)
1963 Rupert Graves – Actor (A Room With a View, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Mrs. Dalloway, V for Vendetta, Death at a Funeral, Marple: A Pocketful of Rye, Wallander: The Man Who Smiled, Lewis: Falling Darkness) He portrays Inspector Lestrade in the modern-day Sherlock series He also played Billy in the Inspector Morse episode Happy Families
1966 Peter Outerbridge - Canadian actor (ReGenesis, The Murdoch Mysteries, Men with Brooms, Millennium, Diagnosis Murder)
1966 Mike Tyson - Boxer
1971 Monica Potter – Actress (Boston Legal, Parenthood, Along Came a Spider, Patch Adams, Con Air)
1982 Ashley Walters – British actor (Hustle, Outcasts, Speed Racer, Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Bullet Boy, Born Romantic)


Died this Day

1520 Montezuma II – The last Aztec Emperor, who had been taken prisoner by conquistador Hernán Cortés and his Spanish soldiers. He died during the Spanish retreat from the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The Spanish, under Cortés, were faced with an Aztec revolt against their rule, and fought their way out of Tenochtitlán at heavy cost. Known to the Spanish as La Noche Triste, or "the Night of Sadness," many soldiers drowned in Lake Texcoco when the vessel carrying them and Aztec treasures hoarded by Cortés sank. Montezuma II, the Aztec emperor who had become merely a subject of Cortés in the previous year, was allowed to talk to his people, but according to Cortés, they were disillusioned with the emperor and stoned him to death. Some historians believe the Spaniards, and not his own people, murdered Montezuma
1660 William Oughtred – British mathematician and inventor of the slide rule
1919 Lord Rayleigh – British physicist and co-discoverer of the inert gas, Argon
1961 Lee de Forest, age 87 - Radio and television pioneer who invented the vacuum tube. He patented the Audion radio tube in 1907, which turned radio into a practical transmission device for voice and music. Previously, wireless technology was primarily used for telegraph signals
1966 Margery Allingham, age 62 – British mystery author who created the amateur detective, Albert Campion (The Crime at Black Dudley, Mystery Mile, Look to the Lady, Police at the Funeral, Sweet Danger, Death of a Ghost, The Case of the Late Pig, The Tiger in the Smoke)
1984 Lillian Hellman - US playwright and screenwriter (The Little Foxes, The Children’s Hour, Scoundrel Time, Toys in the Attic) She died 10 days after her 79th birthday


On this Day

1398 Legend has it that Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, landed at Guysborough, Nova Scotia on this day, visiting the sites of Pictou and Stellarton
1578 Martin Frobisher took possession of Greenland for Queen Elizabeth I. He called it West England
1837 Punishment by pillory was abolished in Britain
1848 Toronto Schools closed for a year because city council refused to raise funding from £500 to £2,000 per annum
1859 Jean-François Gravelet, a Frenchman known professionally as Blondin, became the first daredevil to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. He crossed from the US to Canada in just eight minutes. The feat, which was performed 160 feet above the Niagara gorge just down river from the Falls, was witnessed by some 25,000 spectators. Wearing pink tights and a yellow tunic, Blondin crossed a cable about two inches in diameter and 1,100-feet long with only a balancing pole to protect him from plunging into the dangerous rapids below. While crossing, he drank champagne and did a back somersault. He made the return trip with a massive tripod camera, and stopped midway to photograph the crowds. Many fainted. It was the first in a series of famous Niagara tightrope walks performed by The Great Blondin from 1859 to 1860. These "ascensions," as he advertised them, always had different theatrical variations, including doing tightrope walks blindfolded, in a sack, with his manager on his back, sitting down midway to cook an omelette, on a bicycle, on stilts, and pushing a wheelbarrow across while dressed as an ape while carrying a man on his back. In 1861, he performed at the Crystal Palace in London, turning somersaults on stilts on a rope stretched 170 feet above the ground. Sherlock Holmes referred to Blondin in The Sign of Four
1876 After a slow two-day march, the wounded soldiers from the Battle of the Little Big Horn finally reached the steamboat Far West, and were evacuated from the area. The Far West had been leased by the US Army for the duration of the 1876 campaign against the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne Indians of the Northern Plains. Under the command of the skilled civilian Captain Grant Marsh, the 190-foot vessel was ideal for navigating the shallow waters of the Upper Missouri River system, drawing only 20 inches of water when fully laden. Marsh managed to steam up the shallow Big Horn River in southern Montana in June 1876. There, the boat became a headquarters for the army's planned attack on a village of Sioux and Cheyenne they believed were camping on the nearby Little Big Horn River. On June 28th, Captain Grant and several other men were fishing about a mile from the boat when a young Indian on horseback approached. "He wore an exceedingly dejected countenance," one man later wrote. By signing and drawing on the ground, the Indian managed to convey that there had been a battle but the men did not understand its outcome. The Indian was Curley, one of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's Crow scouts, who three days earlier on the 25th, had been the last man to see Custer and his 7th Cavalry battalion before the Battle of the Little Big Horn. On the 29th, Grant received a dispatch from General Terry, who had found Custer's destroyed battalion and the surviving soldiers, ordering Grant to prepare to evacuate the wounded soldiers. Slowed by the burden of carrying the wounded men, Terry's force did not arrive until the 30th. Grant sped downstream as quickly as possible with the Far West draped in black and flying her flag at half-mast, and delivered the 54 wounded soldiers to Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, North Dakota, at 11:00 p.m. on July 5th. The fast and relatively comfortable transport of the wounded, by steam power, undoubtedly saved numerous lives
1893 In South Africa’s Orange Free State, the finder of a 971.75 carat diamond was awarded £500, plus a horse with bridle and saddle
1894 London’s Tower Bridge was officially opened to traffic
1908 The Tunguska meteorite landed at Vanovara, Siberia, devastating more than 78-hundred square kilometres
1912 Regina, Saskatchewan, experienced its first recorded tornado. Known as the Regina Cyclone, it killed 28 people, injured hundreds more, and is still considered the deadliest in Canadian history. The F4 tornado passed through the city in just three minutes leaving 2,500 homeless. The funnel narrowly missed the newly completed legislature building and began cutting a swath of destruction through Regina's downtown. Whole neighbourhoods were flattened, brick buildings collapsed and three sturdy, stone churches were gutted by the tornado's fury. More than 60 buildings in all were destroyed or badly damaged, including the new Carnegie Public Library. A young British actor, William Pratt, was visiting Regina at the time. When the tornado struck he had been canoeing west of the city and returned to find his accommodations destroyed. He stayed in Regina, helped with the cleanup operation, and organized a benefit concert that raised some much needed funds for the city’s victims. Years later William Pratt moved to Hollywood and changed his name to Boris Karloff
1936 The novel, Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell was published in New York. It was her only book, and would become one of the best-selling novels of all time, selling some 25 million copies. The book sold 1 million copies within six months, with as many as 50,000 copies being bought on a single day
1948 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley demonstrated their invention, the transistor, for the first time. Transistors, tiny wafers containing semiconductors, quickly replaced unwieldy vacuum tubes in most electronic devices. The three men won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956 for their invention
1960 The blood ran in the shower for the first time to a paying audience with the première of Hitchcock’s Psycho, in New York
1963 Pope Paul VI was crowned the 262nd head of the Roman Catholic Church in an outdoor ceremony in Rome's St. Peter's Square
1969 The last of 4,204,925 Ramblers was produced, ending the car line. The Nash Rambler had originally been developed by George Walter Mason after World War II. Years later, after Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson merged to become AMC, the Rambler caught on as a sub-compact car. George Romney, Mason's protégé, coined the term "gas-guzzling dinosaur" to describe the Big Three automaker's products, and led a personal ad campaign promoting the AMC Rambler as an efficient, reliable car
1971 A Soviet space mission ended in tragedy when three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 11 were found dead inside their spacecraft after it returned to Earth
1971 The 26th Amendment to the Constitution, lowering the minimum voting age to 18, was ratified as Ohio became the 38th state to approve it
1974 Russian ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov defected in Toronto while appearing on tour with the Bolshoi Ballet
1983 By international agreement, the world's timekeepers gave the last minute of June 61 seconds. The leap second was to help keep atomic time in tune with solar time
1997 In Hong Kong, the Union Jack was lowered for the last time over Government House as Britain prepared to hand the colony back to China after ruling it for 156 years
1998 Officials confirmed that the remains of a Vietnam War serviceman buried in the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery were identified as those of Air Force pilot Michael J. Blassie