Born this Day

1754 Ward Chipman – Loyalist lawyer, politician, and promoter of New Brunswick, who was born in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Chipman was a Harvard educated lawyer who took up the Loyalist cause and organised the movement to create the new province of New Brunswick in 1784. He also drafted the Saint John city charter
1818 Emily Brontë – British author (Wuthering Heights) She was the fifth-born of the six Brontë children. Her sisters Charlotte and Anne were also authors. The Brontë family lived in the remote village of Haworth on the bleak Yorkshire moors and were largely left to their own devices after the death of their mother when Emily was two. A shy, reclusive child, Emily suffered intensely from homesickness whenever she left the parsonage. She joined her three older sisters at a school for clergymen's children when she was six, but the two oldest died, partly because of the school's harsh and unhealthy conditions. She and Charlotte returned home. The girls, along with sister Anne and brother Branwell, read voraciously and created their own elaborate stories about mythical lands. In 1845, Charlotte came across some poems Emily had written and revealed that she too had secretly been writing verse. So had Anne, they learned. Charlotte published their joint work, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, in 1846. Although the book sold only two copies, the sisters continued writing
1863 Henry Ford – US auto pioneer and manufacturer who introduced the first assembly line production. He was born in Dearborn, Michigan
1889 Vladimir Zworykin – Russian-born US inventor who was called the “Father of Television” for inventing the iconoscope
1898 Henry Moore - British sculptor, born in Castleford, Yorkshire. The son of a coal miner, he overcame early criticism of his work to become one of the most acclaimed sculptors of the 20th century. Among his major commissions were sculptures for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, for the Lincoln Centre in New York City, for the University of Chicago, and for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. For the last four decades of his life, he lived unostentatiously in a farmhouse in Much Hadham, 30 miles north of London
1909 Professor Cyril Northcote Parkinson – British author (In Laws and Outlaws) and professor of history, who invented Parkinson’s Law, which states, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”
1916 Dick Wilson - Actor best known as Mr. Whipple in the “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin” ads
1925 Jacques Sernas - Actor (55 Days at Peking, La Dolce Vita, Superfly T.N.T.)
1927 Richard Johnson – British actor (The Haunting, The Secret Life of Ian Fleming, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, The Robinsons, Her Royal Affair, Spooks/MI-5, Lewis: The Dead of Winter) He played Justice Lord Fenwick in the Kavanagh QC episode Job Satisfaction
1927 Victor Wong – Actor (Tremors, The Last Emperor, Year of the Dragon, Big Trouble in Little China, The Golden Child, The Joy Luck Club, Seven Years in Tibet)
1929 Christine McGuire – Singer with her family group The McGuire Sisters (Sincerely, Something's Gotta Give, He, Sugartime)
1933 Edd Byrnes - Actor (77 Sunset Strip, Grease, Darby's Rangers, Shake Rattle and Roll: An American Love Story, Troop Beverly Hills, Twirl)
1934 Ben Piazza - Actor (Guilty by Suspicion, The Hanging Tree)
1936 Buddy Guy - Blues musician, once described by Eric Clapton as the best guitar player alive
1939 Peter Bogdanovich - Director (Texasville, The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon, What's Up Doc?)
1941 Paul Anka – Canadian-born singer/songwriter (Johnny's Theme-the Tonight Show Theme, She's a Lady, Diana, You Are My Destiny, Lonely Boy, Put Your Head on My Shoulder, Puppy Love, You're Having My Baby) He translated the French song, Comme d'Habitude, retitled it My Way, and it became one of Frank Sinatra's biggest hits
1945 David Sanborn - Jazz musician and saxophonist
1948 Carel Struycken – Dutch actor (Men in Black, The Addams Family, Addams Family Values, Oblivion, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Twin Peaks, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band)
1947 Arnold Schwarzenegger – Austrian-born actor (Eraser, The Terminator, Predator, Twins, Conan the Barbarian, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, True Lies) He is a former governor of California
1947 William Atherton - Actor (Die Hard, Ghostbusters, The Day of the Locust, Oscar, The Pelican Brief, The Last Samurai, Frank & Jesse, Centennial)
1948 Jean Reno – Moroccan actor (Ronin, The Da Vinci Code, The Pink Panther, Rollerball, Mission: Impossible, French Kiss, Nikita)
1950 Frank Stallone - Actor (Ten Little Indians, Hudson Hawk, Rocky) He is the brother of Sylvester Stallone
1953 Philip Davis – British actor (Bleak House, Silk, Whitechapel, Sherlock: A Study in Pink, Brighton Rock, Collision, Marple: Sleeping Murder, Rose and Maloney, Nicholas Nickleby, Photographing Fairies, Alien 3, The Bounty) He played Harold Manners/Roland Sherman in the Inspector Morse episode Absolute Conviction
1954 Ken Olin – Actor (thirtysomething, Hill Street Blues, Falcon Crest, Brothers & Sisters)
1956 Delta Burke - Actress (Designing Women, Delta, Filthy Rich, What Women Want)
1958 Kate Bush – British singer/songwriter (Running Up That Hill, Wuthering Heights, Wow, Cloudbusting)
1958 Richard Burghi – Actor (Desperate Housewives, Harper’s Island, The Sentinal, Point Pleasant, In Her Shoes, 24, Judging Amy, Days of Our Lives, Chuck)
1961 Laurence Fishburne – Stage and screen actor (The Matrix movies, Two Trains Running, Apocalypse Now, Bad Company, Boyz in the Hood, Red Heat, Othello, The Color Purple, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Thurgood, Mission Impossible III, Contagion)
1962 Alton Brown – TV chef (Good Eats, Iron Chef America, The Next Food Network Star, The Best Think I Ever Ate)
1963 Lisa Kudrow - Actress (Friends, Mad About You, Bob, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Easy A, Web Therapy, Analyze This)
1964 Vivica A. Fox – Actress (Kill Bill Vol. 1, Independence Day, Ella Enchanted, City of Angels, Batman & Robin, The Young and the Restless, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Junkyard Dog, The Slammin’ Salmon)
1968 Terry Crews – Actor (Are We There Yet?, Everybody Hates Chris, Bridesmaids, White Chicks, The Expendables, Terminator Salvation, Norbit, Idiocracy, Brooklyn Nine-Nine)
1969 Simon Baker – Australian actor (The Mentalist, The Guardian, The Devil Wears Prada, Land of the Dead, Red Planet, Heartbreak High, L.A. Confidential, Margin Call)
1974 Hilary Swank - Actress (Boys Don't Cry, The Next Karate Kid, Million Dollar Baby, Amelia, The Black Dahlia, Beverly Hills 90210)
1975 John Reardon – Canadian actor (Arctic Air, Continuum, TRON: Legacy, Painkiller Jane, Edgemont, Scary Movie 4, White Chicks)
1977 Jaime Pressly – Actress (My Name is Earl, DOA: Dead or Alive, I Love You Man, Not Another Teen Movie, Joe Dirt, Jack & Jill)
1980 April Bowlby – Actress (Drop Dead Diva, Sands of Oblivion, All Roads Lead Home, The Slammin’ Salmon, Two and a Half Men, Doom Patrol)
1982 Yvonne Strahovski - Australian actress (Chuck, Killer Elite, Dexter, I Frankenstein, 24: Live Another Day, The Astronaut Wives Club, Matching Jack, I Love You Too, Headland, The Canyon, The Handmaid's Tale)


Died this Day

1718 William Penn – British Quaker leader who founded Pennsylvania
1771 Thomas Gray – British poet (Elegy in a Country Churchyard)
1992 Joe Shuster, age 78 – Canadian-born cartoonist. He was born in Toronto, and moved to Cleveland, Ohio at age 9, where he would later meet Jerome Siegel, his future creative partner and co-creator of Superman
1996 Claudette Colbert, age 92 – French actress (It Happened One Night, Three-Cornered Moon, The Gilded Lily, The Palm Beach Story) She died in Barbados
1998 Buffalo Bob Smith, age 80 - The cowboy-suited host of The Howdy Doody Show, died of cancer in Hendersonville, NC


On this Day

1609 At Ticonderoga, Samuel de Champlain became the first European to use firearms against the Indians when he joined the skirmish against the Iroquois at Crown Point. He killed two chiefs with his arquebus
1619 In Jamestown, Virginia, the first elected legislative assembly in the New World, the House of Burgesses, convened in the town's church. Earlier that year, the London Company, which had established the Jamestown settlement 12 years before, directed Virginia Governor Sir George Yeardley to summon a General Assembly elected by the settlers, with every free adult male voting. Twenty-two representatives from the 11 Jamestown boroughs were chosen, and Master John Pory was appointed the assembly's speaker. On July 30, the House of Burgesses convened for the first time. Its first law, which, like all of its laws, would have to be approved by the London Company, required tobacco to be sold for at least three shillings per pound. Other laws passed during its first six-day session included prohibitions against gambling, drunkenness, and idleness, and a measure that made Sabbath observance mandatory
1729 The city of Baltimore was founded
1792 The French national anthem, La Marseillaise, by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, was first sung in Paris
1793 Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe started to build the city of York, now Toronto
1855 Jean François Gravelet became the first person to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope
1887 The Victoria Bridge was completed at Lachine, Québec. It was the first railway bridge over the St. Lawrence
1928 George Eastman demonstrated the first full-colour motion picture
1932 Walt Disney released his first cartoon in colour. The cartoon, Flowers and Trees, was made in three-colour Technicolor. Disney was the only studio that used the process for the next three years, because of an exclusive contract
1935 The first Penguin book was published, starting the paperback revolution. Ariel, a life of Shelley by André Maurois was the first title selected to be produced at a price to suit all pockets
1936 Margaret Mitchell sold the film rights for Gone With the Wind to MGM
1942 President Roosevelt signed a bill creating a women's auxiliary agency in the Navy known as Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES for short
1945 At 12:14 a.m., the USS Indianapolis, a 9,800-ton Portland class heavy cruiser, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea and sank in 12 minutes. The ship had just delivered key components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to the Pacific island of Tinian. Of 1,196 men on board, approximately 300 went down with the ship. The remainder, about 900 men, were left floating in shark-infested waters with no lifeboats and most with no food or water. For four days, they faced dehydration, sunstroke and sharks. There was no time for a distress signal before the Indianapolis went down, and the ship was never missed. By the time the survivors were spotted by a patrol aircraft, by accident, August 2nd, only 316 men were still alive. In the movie, Jaws, actor Robert Shaw wrote and delivered a moving account of this tragedy
1962 At Rogers Pass, BC, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker officially opened the Trans-Canada Highway to traffic, eliminating the final 100 miles of dusty, gravel road from Golden to Revelstoke. Running almost 5,600 miles, from St. John's, Newfoundland to Victoria BC, the Trans Canada is the longest national highway in the world. Construction began in 1950
1965 President Johnson signed into law the Medicare bill, which went into effect the following year
1966 In the first televised World Cup soccer match, host-nation England beat Germany 4 to 2 to win the tournament final at Wembley Stadium
1974 Québec's legislature gave third reading to Bill 22, which made French the province's official language, and setting up la Régie de la Langue Française
1975 Former US Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa left his Lake Orion home in suburban Detroit for a meeting. He had recently announced plans to try to recapture control of the union he once headed. Hoffa was last seen alive that afternoon in a parking lot outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1982 he was declared legally dead, although his exact fate remains a mystery