Born this Day

1632 Antoine van Leeuwenhoek – Dutch scientist credited with inventing the first practical microscope. He ground over 400 different lenses and was the first man to see bacteria
1788 Sarah Hale – US editor and author (Northwood: A Tale of New England, Sketches of American Character) She advocated a national Thanksgiving holiday. But her everlasting claim to fame is a poem she published in a children's book in 1830, Mary Had A Little Lamb
1893 Merian C. Cooper – US producer and director (King Kong, The Four Feathers, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man)
1906 Sir Robert Sainsbury – British grocery chain founder
1915 Bob Kane – US cartoonist best known for creating Batman. When he sold the first Batman story to DC, which appeared in Detective Comics #27 dated May 1939, he insisted on owning a copyrighted interest in Batman, which would reap him a large salary throughout the decades. He was asked to come to Hollywood to help with the development of the upcoming Batman TV show in 1965 which was a huge success
1930 John P. Richardson – US singer and songwriter known as The Big Bopper (Chantilly Lace, Big Bopper's Wedding) and songwriter (Running Bear)
1936 Bill Wyman – British bass guitarist with The Rolling Stones (Satisfaction, Get Off of My Cloud, Tumbling Dice)
1936 David Nelson - Actor (The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Peyton Place, Cry-Baby) He’s the son of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson and brother of Ricky Nelson
1939 F. Murray Abraham - Actor (Amadeus, Surviving the Game, Last Action Hero, Scarface, Serpico, The Sunshine Boys, All the President's Men, The Name of the Rose, Star Trek: Insurrection)
1946 Jerry Edmonton – Canadian drummer with the group Steppenwolf (Born to be Wild, Magic Carpet Ride, Rock Me)
1947 Kevin Kline – Actor (A Fish Called Wanda, Silverado, Dave, Princess Caraboo, The Big Chill, Sophie's Choice, Cry Freedom, Soapdish, French Kiss, Disclaimer)
1962 B.D. Wong – Actor (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Seven Years in Tibet, Oz, Executive Decision, The Ref, Jurassic Park, Father of the Bride)


Died this Day

1537 Jane Seymour - Third wife of King Henry VIII. She died 12 days after giving birth to Prince Edward, later King Edward VI
1991 Gene Roddenberry, age 70 – Producer and the creator of the Star Trek phenomenon. He died in Santa Monica of a heart attack


On this Day

1621 The first French child born in North America was baptised in Québec. Eustache Martin was born to Marguerite Langlois, the wife of Abraham Martin. Martin was the farmer who gave his name to the Plains of Abraham, where the British defeated the French in September 1759
1648 The Treaty of Westphalia was signed, ending the Thirty Years War and radically shifting the balance of power in Europe. The Thirty Years War, a series of wars fought by European nations, ignited in 1618 over an attempt by the King of Bohemia (the future Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II) to impose Catholicism throughout his domains. Protestant nobles rebelled, and by the 1630s most of continental Europe was at war. As a result of the Treaty of Westphalia, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved, Sweden gained control of the Baltic, independence of the Netherlands from Spain was fully recognised, and France was acknowledged as the pre-eminent Western power. The war had devastated Europe, particularly Germany, where unpaid armies of mercenaries plundered and ravaged cities, towns, and farms
1795 The country of Poland ceased to exist. At negotiations for the third partition of Poland, the last independent Polish territory was divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia. In 1772, after an elective Polish monarch failed to produce a strong central authority, Prussia, Russia, and Austria carried out the first partition of the country, followed by a second partition by Prussia and Russia in 1793. In 1918, the Poles finally regained their independence in the aftermath of World War I, but it was snatched away again in 1939 when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia agreed to divide the nation between them. In 1944, the country of Poland was re-established as a Communist republic within the Soviet bloc
1861 Workers of the Western Union Telegraph Company linked the eastern and western telegraph networks of the nation at Salt Lake City, Utah, completing a transcontinental line that for the first time allowed instantaneous communication between Washington, DC, and San Francisco. Stephen J. Field, chief justice of California, sent the first transcontinental telegram to President Abraham Lincoln. The push to create a transcontinental telegraph line had begun only a little more than year before when Congress authorised a subsidy of $40,000 a year to any company building a telegraph line that would join the eastern and western networks. The obstacles to building the line over the sparsely populated and isolated western plains and mountains were huge. Wire and glass insulators had to be shipped by sea to San Francisco and carried eastward by horse-drawn wagons over the Sierra Nevada, and thousands of telegraph poles had to be shipped from the western mountains to the largely treeless Plains country
1901 Daredevil Annie Edson Taylor initiated a famous stunt tradition when she became the first known person to survive a ride over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. The Michigan teacher and non-swimmer, who performed the feat on her 43rd birthday, went over the 175-foot-tall Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side of Niagara inside a barrel 4-½ ft high and 3 ft in diameter. A leather harness and cushions lined the barrel and protected Taylor during her fall. She emerged shaken, but unhurt in the river below. Taylor hoped that after the stunt she could pay off her mortgage and make a fortune touring the world, displaying the famous barrel and relating the adventure. Although the stunt did indeed receive international attention, Taylor reaped few financial rewards, and died in poverty after 20 years as a Niagara street vendor
1902 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted by King Edward VII in recognition of his services to the Crown during the Boer War
1903 In Saskatchewan, the coach of the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians football team had football-shaped patches sewn to the front of his players' sweaters in order to fool an opposing team
1926 A beam system of wireless transmission to England was first successfully inaugurated at Montréal
1928 The Canadian Post Office issued Canada's first bilingual stamp in the 2¢ denomination. It had a bust of King George V and the words Postes and Postage
1931 The George Washington Bridge, connecting New York and New Jersey, opened to traffic
1939 Nylon stockings were sold publicly for the first time, in Wilmington, Delaware
1940 The US’s 40-hour work week went into effect under the Fair Labour Standards Act of 1938
1945 Less than two months after the end of World War II, the United Nations was formally established with the ratification of the United Nations Charter
1948 The term “cold war” was first given national prominence after a speech by the industrialist and statesman Bernard Baruch before the Senate War Investigating Committee. Baruch used the term to characterise the rapidly cooling relationship between the US and the Soviet Union after World War II. Asked about US and Soviet relations, Baruch stated, "Although the war is over, we are the midst of a cold war which is getting warmer"
1958 Mystery writer Raymond Chandler started work on his last novel, The Poodle Springs Story. He would die the following March, before completing it
1969 Richard Burton gave Elizabeth Taylor a diamond ring weighing more than sixty-nine carats and worth more than $1,000,000 from Cartier's
1976 The Sherlock Holmes movie, The Seven Per-Cent Solution, opened. It was based on the best-selling novel by Nicholas Meyer
1989 The Reverend Jim Bakker, a popular television evangelist, was sentenced to forty-five years in prison, and fined $500,000 for his conviction on twenty-four counts of fraud and conspiracy. Bakker, the founder of the Christian organisation The PTL (Praise the Lord or People that Love) Club, built an evangelist empire that included Heritage USA, a $172 million theme park in Fort Mill, South Carolina. In 1987, Bakker resigned his ministry following admittance of an extramarital affair, and in 1988 he was sued by the new PTL management for mismanagement and unjustified compensation, leading to his trial for fraud and conspiracy. Bakker was found guilty of defrauding 114,000 PTL followers by selling $1,000 "partnerships" that promised lifetime lodging rights at the Heritage USA theme park. Bakker oversold the lodging units and used the funds to pay PTL operating expenses and support a lavish lifestyle. In 1991, an appeals court found the forty-five-year sentence excessive and reduced it to eighteen years. In 1994, Bakker was paroled after serving almost five years in prison
1992 The Toronto Blue Jays became the first non-US team to win the World Series, defeating the Atlanta Braves 4-3 in Game 6. Dave Winfield hit a two run double in the 11th inning to give Toronto the win. Technically, the game was actually won on the 25th, as it ended after midnight