Born this Day

1799 David Douglas – Scottish botanist and explorer. The Douglas fir is named after him
1844 Thomas Eakins - Realist painter (Walt Whitman, The Thinker)
1894 Walter Brennan - Actor (Come and Get It, Rio Bravo, The Real McCoys, The Guns of Will Sonnett, The Gnomemobile) and singer (Old Rivers, Dutchman's Gold, Mama Sang a Song)
1908 Jack Gilford – Actor (Cocoon, Save the Tiger, They Might Be Giants, Catch-22, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum)
1923 Estelle Getty - Actress (Golden Girls, Golden Palace, Tootsie, Mask, Stuart Little, Empty Nest, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot)
1934 Don Ellis - Jazz musician, trumpeter and composer (Theme from the French Connection, New Nine, Milo's Theme, Star Children)
1935 Barbara Harris - Actress (Plaza Suite, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Peggy Sue Got Married)
1943 Janet Margolin - Actress (Annie Hall, The Triangle Factory Fire Scandal, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Take the Money and Run)
1955 Iman – Somalian-born model and actress (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Heart of Darkness, LA Story, No Way Out, Out of Africa) She is married to David Bowie
1967 Matt LeBlanc - Actor (Friends, Joey, Lost in Space, Episodes)
1969 D.B. Woodside – Actor (Romeo Must Die, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Temptations, Murder One, Parenthood)
1973 David Denman – Actor (Drop Dead Diva, The Office, Shutter, Big Fish, When a Stranger Calls, The Replacements)
1978 Louise Brown - The world's first test-tube baby, was born in Lancashire, England
1987 Michael Welch – Actor (Twilight, New Moon, Joan of Arcadia, Unrequited, The Grind, Star Trek: Insurrection)


Died this Day

1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, age 61 – British poet (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, Fears in Solitude, The Keepsake)
1843 Charles Macintosh, age 76 – Scottish chemist who invented waterproof clothing
1853 Joaquin Murrieta – Californian outlaw who was killed by California Rangers. In the early months of 1853, a wild band of desperadoes began terrorising Calaveras County in central California. The California legislature resolved to stop the outlaws, and that spring, created a special force of California Rangers and offered a $6,000 award to anyone who brought in Murrieta, dead or alive. The rangers, led by a Los Angeles Deputy Sheriff named Harry Love, attacked the outlaw camp early on the morning of this day in 1853. Caught by surprise and badly outnumbered, eight of the bandits were killed, including Murrieta and his right hand man Tres Dedos, who was also known as Three Fingered Jack. To prove they had indeed killed Murrieta and deserved their award, the rangers cut off the head of the outlaw, as well as the distinctive hand that gave Three Fingered Jack his nickname. The rangers preserved the gory body parts in whiskey-filled vats until they could exhibit them to the authorities in Stockton. Despite some protests that the severed head was not Murrieta's, the state gave the $6,000 award to Love and his rangers. Love further profited from the deal by taking Murrieta's head on a tour of California mining camps, charging $1 to see it. Eventually, the head ended up in the San Francisco Museum, where it was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1906
1865 Dr. James (Jane) Barry – British doctor, died on Corfu. She had become the first woman doctor, although only by masquerading as a man. This enabled her to rise to Inspector General in the British army, having qualified in 1812. In 1819, while stationed in Cape Town, Barry not only introduced vaccinations, but was also involved in a duel which threatened to end her military and medical career. She had several affairs, and an illegitimate child, but only on her death was it officially admitted that she was a woman
1887 Henry Mahew – Founder of Punch
1899 Theodore August Heintzman, age 82 – Canadian entrepreneur and piano manufacturer. He started making pianos in Toronto before 1860, and founded the Heintzman and Company piano manufacturing company in Toronto in 1866
1973 Louis St. Laurent, age 91 – The 12th prime minister of Canada, died in Québec City


On this Day

1593 France's King Henry IV converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism
1832 The first recorded railroad accident in US history occurred when four people were thrown off a vacant car on the Granite Railway near Quincy, Massachusetts. The victims had been invited to view the process of transporting large and weighty loads of stone when a cable on a vacant car snapped on the return trip, throwing them off the train and over a 34-foot cliff. One man was killed and the others were seriously injured
1866 Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army, the first officer to hold the rank
1868 Congress passed an act creating the Wyoming Territory
1888 Frank McGurrin, the official stenographer of the Salt Lake city Federal Court, beat typing instructor Luis Taub at a speed-typing contest in Cincinnati. McGurrin demonstrated touch-typing for the first time, while his opponent used four fingers, and had to look at the keyboard
1897 US author Jack London sailed for the Klondike to join the gold rush, where he would write his first successful stories
1898 During the Spanish-American War, US forces launched their invasion of Puerto Rico
1909 French aviator Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel in a monoplane, travelling from Calais to Dover in 37 minutes
1911 Bobby Leach survived a drop over Niagara Falls in a steel barrel. He spent 23 weeks in hospital recovering from his injuries
1917 Canadian Finance Minister Sir Thomas White introduced the Income Tax War Bill. His proposal to levy income tax on Canadians was a wartime measure only. (I wish! )
1917 Mata Hari, the archetype of the seductive female spy, was sentenced to death in France for spying on Germany's behalf
1946 In Atlantic City, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis gave their first performance as a team
1946 The US detonated an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.
1952 In Montréal, Québec, the CBC/Radio Canada TV covered the Montréal Royals baseball game. It was the first experimental Canadian telecast. Regular programming would begin that September
1952 Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States
1956 At 11:10 p.m., 45 miles south of Nantucket Island, the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish ocean liner Stockholm collided in a heavy Atlantic fog. Fifty-one passengers and crew were killed in the collision, which ripped a great hole in the broad side of the Italian vessel. Both ships were equipped with sophisticated radar systems, and authorities were puzzled as to the cause of the accident. The lavishly appointed Andrea Doria, put to sea in 1953, was the pride of the Italian line. It was built for luxury, not speed, and boasted extensive safety precautions, such as state-of-the-art radar systems and 11 watertight compartments in its hull. The Stockholm, which went into service in 1948, was a more modest ocean liner, less than half the tonnage and carrying 747 passengers and crew on its fateful voyage. The Andrea Doria held 1,706 passengers and crew in its final journey. The Stockholm was just beginning its journey home to Sweden from New York, while the Andrea Doria was steaming in the opposite direction. The Italian liner had been in an intermittent fog since mid-afternoon, but Captain Piero Calami only slightly reduced his speed, relying on his ship's radar to get him to his destination safely and on schedule. The Stockholm, meanwhile, was directed north of its recommended route by Captain H. Gunnar Nordenson, who risked encountering westbound vessels in the name of reducing travel time. The Stockholm also had radar and expected no difficulty in navigating past approaching vessels. At 10:45 p.m., the Stockholm showed up on the Doria's radar screens, at a distance of about 17 nautical miles. Soon after, the Italian ship showed up on the Stockholm's radar, about 12 miles away. What happened next has been subject to dispute, but it's likely that the crews of both ships misread their radar sets. Captain Calami then exacerbated a dangerous situation by making a turn to port for an unconventional starboard-to-starboard passing, which he wrongly thought the other ship was attempting. At a range of two miles, the ships’ lights came visible to each other. Third Officer Johan-Ernst Carstens, commanding the bridge of the Stockholm, then made a conventional turn to starboard. Less than a mile away, Captain Calami realised he was on a collision course with the Stockholm and turned hard to the left, hoping to race past the bow of the Swedish ship. Both ships were too large and moving too fast to make a quick turn. The Stockholm's sharply angled bow, reinforced for breaking ice, smashed 30 feet into the starboard side of the Andrea Doria. For a moment, the smaller ship was lodged there like a cork in a bottle, but then the opposite momentum of the two ships pulled them apart, and the Stockholm's smashed bow screeched down the side of the Doria, showering sparks into the air. Five crewmen of the Stockholm were killed in the collision. On the Andrea Doria, the carnage was much worse. The bow of the Swedish ship crashed through passenger cabins, and 46 passengers and crew were killed. With seven of its 10 decks open to the Atlantic waters, the Andrea Doria listed more than 20 degrees to port in minutes, and its watertight compartments were compromised. A lifeboat evacuation began on the doomed ship. The evacuation initially went far from smoothly. The port side could not be used because the ship was listing too much, which left 1,044 seats on the lifeboats for the 1,706 on board. Passengers in the lower cabins fought their way through darkened hallways filling up with ocean water and leaking oil. The first lifeboat was not deployed until an hour after the collision, and it held more crew than passengers. Fortunately, the Stockholm, which had suffered a nonfatal blow, was able to lend its lifeboats to the evacuation effort. Several ships heard the Doria's mayday and came to assist. At 2:00 a.m. on July 26, the Ile de France, another great ocean liner, arrived and took charge of the rescue effort. It was the greatest civilian maritime rescue in history, and 1,660 lives were saved. The Stockholm limped back to New York. At 10:09 a.m. on July 26, the Andrea Doria sank into the Atlantic
1984 Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space