Born this Day

1838 Ferdinand Adolf August Heinrich, Count von Zeppelin – German soldier and air pioneer who built rigid dirigibles which were named after him. During the US Civil War, he served as a military observer for the Union Army, where he made his first ascent in a balloon
1839 John D. Rockefeller – US industrialist and philanthropist who founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870. His built his first refinery in 1863 and devoted his later years to philanthropy, giving more than $500 million to charitable causes
1851 Sir Arthur John Evans – British archaeologist who excavated the ruins of the ancient city of Knossos in Crete
1882 Percy Grainger – Australian composer who also collected folk songs. The Grainger Museum for Australian Music was built in Melbourne in 1935
1898 Alec Waugh - British author and travel writer (Island in the Sun, The Loom of Youth) He was the brother of author Evelyn Waugh
1914 Billy Eckstine - Band leader, bass-baritone singer (Fools Rush In, My Foolish Heart, Blue Moon, Body and Soul)
1917 Faye Emerson - Actress (Destination: Tokyo, Uncertain Glory) and TV host (The Faye Emerson Show, Author Meets the Critic)
1917 Pamela Brown - Actress (Wuthering Heights, Cleopatra, Victoria Regina, Alice in Wonderland)
1918 Craig Stevens - Actor (Peter Gunn, Drums in the Deep South, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
1930 Dick Sargent – Actor (Bewitched, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, Rich Man Poor Man, Murder by Numbers, Down to Earth, The Tammy Grimes Show, Operation Petticoat)
1932 Jerry Vale - Singer (Innamorata, You Don't Know Me, Have You Looked Into Your Heart)
1933 Marty Feldman – British comedian and actor (Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, Slapstick of Another Kind, Yellow Beard, The Last Remake of Beau Geste) He played Orville Sacker in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother
1935 Steve Lawrence - Singer (Go Away Little Girl, Pretty Blue Eyes, Portrait of My Love) He was married to singer Eydie Gorme
1944 Jeffrey Tambor - Actor (Arrested Development, Girl Interrupted, Muppets From Space, The Larry Sanders Show, City Slickers, The Hangover, Eloise at the Plaza, Teaching Miss Tingle, Meet Joe Black)
1947 Kim Darby - Actress (Rich Man, Poor Man, True Grit, The Grissom Gang, The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd)
1951 Anjelica Huston – Actress (The Addams Family, Prizzi's Honor, This Is Spinal Tap, Enemies: A Love Story, The Grifters, Lonesome Dove, Smash, The Royal Tenenbaums, Daddy Day Care) She’s the daughter of director John Huston
1958 Kevin Bacon - Actor (Apollo 13, JFK, A Few Good Men, The River Wild, Tremors, Footloose, Murder in the First, The Air Up There, The Guiding Light, National Lampoon’s Animal House, Diner, X-Men: First Class, Frost/Nixon)
1959 Robert Knepper – Actor (Prison Break, Heroes, Good Night and Good Luck, Carnivàle, Search and Destroy, When the Bough Breaks) He played Kim Weatherly in the Perry Mason TV movie The Case of the Fatal Fashion
1959 Pauline Quirke – British actress (The Sculptress, Little Dorritt, Emmerdale Farm, Missing, Carrie’s War, David Copperfield, Maisie Raine, Birds of a Feather, Broadchurch)
1965 Lee Tergesen – Actor (Oz, Longmire, Desperate Housewives, Generation Kill, A Thief of Time, Weird Science, Wayne’s World)
1968 Michael Weatherly – Actor (NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Dark Angel, Charlie Valentine, The Mystery of Natalie Wood, Meet Wally Sparks, Cabin by the Lake)
1973 Kathleen Robertson – Canadian actress (Beverley Hills 90210, Maniac Mansion, Hollywoodland, Scary Movie 2, Blown Away)
1977 Milo Ventimiglia – Actor (Heroes, Gilmore Girls, Rocky Balboa, Gramercy Park, Cursed, Pathology, This Is Us)


Died this Day

1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley – British romantic poet and writer (Prometheus Unbound, Julian and Maddalo, Adonais, Alastor, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc) He drowned off Leghorn while sailing his small schooner to his home on the Gulf of Spezia, less than one month before his 30th birthday. His wife was Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein
1898 Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, age 38 – US con man who gained notoriety in the Old West. He was killed in Skagway, Alaska, by a disgruntled city engineer. Born in Georgia, Smith went west while still a young man, but grew tired of the hard work and low wages as a cowboy in Texas. He soon discovered that he could make more money with less effort by convincing gullible westerners to part with their cash in clever confidence games. One of Smith's earliest swindles was the "prehistoric man" of Creede, Colorado, when he obtained a 10-foot statue of a primitive looking human that he secretly buried near the town of Creede. He uncovered the statue with much fanfare and publicity, charging exorbitant fees to see it. He earned his nickname "Soapy" while travelling around the Southwest, where he would briefly set up shop in the street selling bars of soap wrapped in blue tissue paper. He promised the crowds that a few lucky purchasers would find a $100 bill wrapped inside a few of the $5 bars of soap. Inevitably, one of the first to buy a bar would shout with pleasure and happily display a genuine $100 bill. Sales were generally brisk afterwards. The lucky purchaser, of course, was a shill. In 1897, Smith joined the Alaskan gold rush, ending up in the rough frontier town of Skagway, where he became the head of an ambitious criminal underworld, fleecing thousands of gullible miners with his criminal partners. This angered the honest citizens of Skagway, who were trying to build an upstanding community. They formed a vigilante Committee of 101 in an attempt to bring law and order to the town. Smith formed his own gang into a Committee of 303 to oppose them. On the day he died, Smith tried to crash a vigilante meeting on the Skagway wharf, hoping to use his skills to persuade them that he posed no threat to the community. However, he had failed to realise just how angry the vigilantes were, and when he tried to break through the crowd, a Skagway city engineer named Frank Reid confronted him. The men exchanged harsh words and then bullets. Reid shot Smith dead on the spot, but not before Smith had badly wounded him. Reid died 12 days later. Funeral services for Smith were held in a Skagway church he had donated funds to help build. The minister chose as the text for his sermon a line from Proverbs XIII: "The way of transgressors is hard"
1917 Tom Thomson - One of the most brilliant painters in Canadian art history, his oils and scenes of desolate northern landscape are among the best known works in Canada. He drowned while canoeing in Canoe Lake at Algonquin Park in Ontario, a month before his 40th birthday
1979 Michael Wilding – British actor (The World of Suzie Wong, Maytime in Mayfair, Torch Song) He died of complications from a fall, two weeks before his 67th birthday. He was married to Elizabeth Taylor, and was the father of Chris Wilding, and Michael Wilding, Jr


On this Day

1497 Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama set sail from Lisbon with four vessels in search of a sea route to India
1629 The King of Spain sent King Charles I of England an elephant and five camels. Included were instructions that the elephant be given a gallon of wine each day
1663 King Charles II of England granted a charter to Rhode Island
1776 The first public reading of the Declaration of Independence was held in Philadelphia. The Liberty Bell rang out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House, now known as Independence Hall, summoning citizens to the reading by Colonel John Nixon. On July 4, the historic document was adopted by delegates to the Continental Congress meeting in the State House. However, the Liberty Bell, which bore the Biblical quotation, "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land unto All the Inhabitants Thereof," was not rung until the Declaration of Independence returned from the printer on July 8
1835 Augusta Ada Byron, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, married William King, who shortly thereafter became the Earl of Lovelace. Both Ada, a mathematical prodigy, and her husband devoted much time and energy to helping promote Charles Babbage's mechanical computer, the Difference Engine
1889 The Wall Street Journal was first published
1892 Inspector Eduardo Alvarez found a number of bloody fingerprints at the scene of a murder in the small town of Necochea, Argentina. The prints were matched to those of the suspect, who was the first person to be convicted on the evidence of fingerprints. Almost two weeks earlier, Francesca Rojas' two young children were killed in their home. According to Rojas, a man named Velasquez had threatened her when she rejected his sexual advances earlier in the day. Upon returning home later, Rojas claimed to have seen Velasquez escaping out her open door. Once inside, she found both her six-year-old boy and four-year-old girl beaten to death. Police immediately arrested and questioned Velasquez. He denied any involvement, even after more than a week of torture, that included tying him to the corpses of the children overnight. He maintained his innocence throughout the ordeal. Juan Vucetich, in charge of criminal identification at the regional headquarters, had been intrigued by the new theories of fingerprint identification and wanted to see if the methods could help crack the case. Until then, the only other method of identification had been devised by Alphonse Bertillon, who worked for the Paris police. His method involved the precise recording of a criminal's body measurements in over 200 different places, and was much more practical, as photography was very expensive. When Rojas' house was examined, a bloody thumbprint was found on the bedroom door, and a saw was used to cut that portion away. Rojas was then asked to provide an ink-print of her thumb at the police station. Investigators were able to determine that the print on the door belonged to Rojas. Using this new piece of evidence, detectives were able to exact her confession. Rojas had killed her own children in an attempt to improve her chance of marrying her boyfriend, who was known to dislike children, and then pegged the crime on Velasquez. She was sentenced to life imprisonment
1899 The last bareknuckle world heavyweight boxing match took place in Richburg, Mississippi, when John L. Sullivan beat Jake Kilgrain in the 75th round!
1907 Florenz Ziegfeld staged his first Follies on the roof of the New York Theatre
1918 National Savings stamps went on sale in Britain
1918 Ernest Hemingway was severely wounded while carrying a companion to safety on the Austro-Italian front during World War I. Hemingway, working as a Red Cross ambulance driver, was decorated for his heroism and sent home
1950 US General Douglas MacArthur was named commander-in-chief of UN forces in Korea