Born this Day

1825 Johann Strauss the Younger – Austrian composer known as The Waltz King (On the Beautiful Blue Danube, Emperor Waltz, Die Fledermaus, A Night in Venice, The Gypsy Baron)
1838 Georges Bizet – French composer (Carmen, The Pearl Fishers, The Young Girl of Perth)
1881 Pablo Picasso – Spanish painter and sculptor who was the founder of cubism. He had his first exhibit at age 13, and his life work comprised more than 50,000 paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures, and ceramics produced over 80 years
1888 Richard E. Byrd – US naval officer, pioneer aviator and polar explorer
1892 Leo G. Carroll - Actor (The Prize, The Parent Trap, North by Northwest, The Man from UNCLE)
1909 Whit Bissell – Actor (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Time Tunnel, Bachelor Father, Gunfight at the OK Corral, The Miracle on 34th Street) He was in the Perry Mason episodes The Case of the Lavender Lipstick and The Case of the Crooked Candle
1912 Minnie Pearl – Comedienne (Hee Haw, Grand Ole Opry) and singer (Giddyup Go-Answer)
1924 Billy Barty – Comedian and actor (Circus Boy, Willow, Tough Guys, Rumpelstiltskin, Day of the Locust)
1928 Tony Franciosa - Actor (The Drowning Pool, A Face in the Crowd, The Long Hot Summer, Stagecoach, The Name of the Game, Matt Helm)
1928 Marion Ross – Actress (Happy Days, Mr. Novak, Life with Father, Grand Theft Auto)
1928 Jeanne Cooper – Actress (The Young & the Restless, The Boston Strangler, Bracken’s World, The Mystery of Edward Sims) She also guest-starred in several Perry Mason episodes
1941 Gordon Tootoosis – Canadian actor (North of 60, Legends of the Fall, Blackstone, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Moccasin Flats, One Dead Indian, Cowboys and Indians: The J.J. Harper Story, Black Robe)
1941 Ann Tyler - Author (The Accidental Tourist, Searching for Caleb, Morgan's Passing, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant)
1941 Helen Reddy – Australian singer (I Am Woman, I Don't Know How to Love Him, Ruby Red Dress)
1944 Jon Anderson - Singer with the group Yes and the duo Jon and Vangelis (Roundabout, I Hear You Now, I'll Find My Way Home)
1944 Taffy Danoff – Singer with the Starland Vocal Band (Afternoon Delight)
1949 Brian Kerwin - Actor (Lobo, Beggars and Choosers, The Blue and the Gray)
1961 Chad Smith - Rock musician with the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Under the Bridge, Knock Me Down, Higher Ground)
1963 Tracy Nelson – Actress (Father Dowling Mysteries, Square Pegs, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Yours Mine & Ours) She is the daughter of Ricky Nelson, and the niece of Mark Harmon
1964 Michael Boatman – Actor (China Beach, Spin City, Hamburger Hill, Arli$$, The Good Wife)


Died this Day

1400 Geoffrey Chaucer – English poet (The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, The Knight’s Tale) He died in London before he could finish The Canterbury Tales, which he started c. 1387. His tomb is in Westminster Abbey
1647 Evangelista Torricelli – Italian mathematician and physicist who invented the barometer, which was then known as the Torricellian Tube. He died 10 days after his 39th birthday
1760 King George II – English King who was succeeded by his grandson, King George III
1920 King Alexander – Greek monarch who became king in 1917 when his father, Constantine, was forced by the Allies to abdicate because of his pro-German sympathies during World War I. Alexander died from blood poisoning shortly after being bitten by a pet monkey. After Alexander's death, Constantine was restored to the throne
1965 Dr. Albert Schweitzer, age 90 – French missionary surgeon, organist and 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner. He died at the hospital he founded in Lambarene, Gabon
1993 Vincent Price, age 82 – Actor, art and food expert (House of Wax, The Fly, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tingler, The House of Usher, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Raven, Laura, The Three Musketeers, Twice-told Tales, Edward Scissorhands) He was born to a well-to-do candy maker and his wife in St. Louis, Missouri. After attending Yale, Price studied at the University of London and became a popular actor on the English stage. He was also the first host of PBS's Mystery!, which brought us all so many of our favourite mystery programmes, like Morse, Poirot and Sherlock. He played Egghead in TV's Batman. And, he was the voice of Professor Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective
2002 Richard Harris, age 72 – Irish actor (Harry Potter, Camelot, Hawaii, A Man Called Horse, Unforgiven, Orca, The Cassandra Crossing, Patriot Games) and singer (MacArthur Park)


On this Day

1415 The young King of England, Henry V, led his forces to victory at the Battle of Agincourt in northern France, during the Hundred Years' War between England and France. Two months earlier, Henry had crossed the English Channel with 11,000 men and laid siege to Harfleur in Normandy. After five weeks the town surrendered, but Henry lost half his men to disease and battle casualties. He decided to march his army northeast to Calais, where he would meet the English fleet and return to England. At Agincourt, however, a vast French army of 20,000 men stood in his path, greatly outnumbering the exhausted English archers, knights, and men-at-arms. The battlefield lay on 1,000 yards of open ground between two woods, which prevented large-scale manoeuvres and thus worked to Henry's advantage. At 11 a.m. on October 25, the battle commenced. The English stood their ground as French knights, weighed down by their heavy armour, began a slow advance across the muddy battlefield. The French were met by a furious bombardment of artillery from the English archers, who wielded innovative longbows with a range of 250 yards. French cavalrymen tried and failed to overwhelm the English positions, but the archers were protected by a line of pointed stakes. As more and more French knights made their way onto the crowded battlefield, their mobility decreased further, and some lacked even the room to raise their arms and strike a blow. At this point, Henry ordered his lightly equipped archers to rush forward with swords and axes, and the unencumbered Englishmen massacred the French. Almost 6,000 Frenchmen lost their lives during the Battle of Agincourt, while English deaths amounted to just over 400. With odds greater than three to one, Henry had won one of the great victories of military history. After further conquests in France, Henry V was recognised in 1420 as heir to the French throne and the regent of France. He was at the height of his powers but died just two years later of camp fever near Paris
1748 Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, was commissioned as justice of the peace for Westminster and Middlesex. In this role, he helped break up notorious criminal gangs
1768 Port La Joie, the major town in Prince Edward Island, was renamed Charlottetown in honour of Queen Charlotte
1798 The boundary commission made the St. Croix River the southern border between New Brunswick and Maine
1839 Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, the world’s first railway guide, was published in Manchester. Holmes and Watson sure made good use of it!
1854 Lord James Cardigan lead the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade on an order by Lord Raglan. A misunderstanding between Commander-in-Chief Raglan, and cavalry commander, Lord Lucan, led the Light Brigade, under Cardigan to attack wrongly identified Russian artillery up a heavily defended valley. It was an event alternately described as one of the most heroic episodes in British military history and one of the most disastrous. Cardigan led a charge of light cavalry over open terrain against well-defended Russian artillery at Balaclava during the Crimean War. Cardigan's brigade of cavalrymen, the majority of which were armed only with swords, were no match for the heavy Russian guns. Of the 673 cavalrymen taking part in Cardigan's disastrous charge, nearly half were killed. Cardigan and other survivors of the charge were hailed as heroes for their bravery, and the great discipline they demonstrated. The action inspired Tennyson’s poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade
1881 The airbrush was patented by L.L. Curtis in the US
1920 Nova Scotia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta voted in favour of prohibition
1929 During the Teapot Dome affair, Albert B. Fall, who served as secretary of the interior in President Warren G. Harding's cabinet, was found guilty of accepting a bribe while in office. Fall was the first individual to be convicted of a crime committed while a presidential cabinet member. As a member of President Harding's cabinet in the early 1920s, Hall accepted a $100,000 interest-free "loan" from Edward Doheny of the Pan-American Petroleum and Transport Company, who wanted Fall to grant his firm a valuable oil lease in the Elk Hills naval oil reserve in California. The site, along with Teapot Dome naval oil reserve in Wyoming, had been previously transferred to the department of the interior on the urging of Fall, who evidently realised the personal gains he could achieve by leasing the land to private corporations. In October of 1923, the Senate Public Lands Committee launched an investigation that revealed not only the $100,000 bribe that Fall received from Doheny, but also that Harry Sinclair, president of Mammoth Oil, had given him some $300,000 in government bonds and cash in exchange for use of the Teapot Dome oil reserve in Wyoming. In 1927, the oil fields were restored to the US government by a Supreme Court decision. In 1929, Fall was convicted of bribery and sentenced to one year in prison and a fine of $100,000. Doheny escaped conviction, but Sinclair was also imprisoned for contempt of Congress and jury tampering
1951 Margaret Roberts, age 26, became the youngest candidate to stand at a British General Election. The Tories won by a narrow margin, but she failed to win her seat. She later went on to win elections under her married name, Margaret Thatcher
1951 Montréal became the first Canadian city to reach a population of more than one-million
1960 The world's first electronic watch, went on sale. It used transistorised electronic circuits and a miniature power cell, instead of a spring and gears, to move the watch's hands
1971 The United Nations General Assembly voted to admit mainland China and expel Taiwan
1972 US swimmer Mark Spitz set a record at the Munich Olympics when he became the first athlete to win seven gold medals at a single Olympiad
1978 At Red Bay, Newfoundland, Selma Barkham and a team of Public Archives of Canada researchers found a Spanish galleon off the coast of Labrador. It had been sunk in 1525
1982 The Senate passed legislation officially naming July 1st Canada Day. It had been previously known as Dominion Day
1983 US Marines and Rangers, assisted by soldiers from six Caribbean nations, invaded Grenada at the order of President Reagan, who said the action was needed to protect US citizens there
1994 Susan Smith of Union, South Carolina, claimed that a carjacker had driven off with her two sons. She later confessed to drowning the children herself in John D. Long Lake, and was convicted of murder