Born this Day

1717 Louis-Joseph Gaultier de La Vérendrye – Canadian fur trader, explorer and soldier. He was the youngest of four sons of explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye, and joined his father's trading company in the West in 1735. Louis-Joseph went with his father to Mandan country on the Missouri River near present day Bismarck, North Dakota, in 1738, and the next year explored Lake Winnipeg, and possibly as far north as The Pas. In 1742 he led the first European exploration across Missouri onto the Great Plains with his brother François and 2 other Frenchmen. Their 15 month journey took them to the Big Horn Mountains in present-day Wyoming, and back along the Cheyenne and Bad rivers. He also served on Lake Champlain during the Seven Years War
1801 Gail Borden – US philanthropist, businessman, and inventor, who envisioned food concentrates as a means of safeguarding the human food supply. He was the first to develop a commercial method of condensing milk
1802 Elijah Lovejoy – US Presbyterian minister turned newspaper publisher and abolitionist
1841 King Edward VII – Eldest son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. He was the first British prince to tour Canada and the US. He was 61 when he was crowned and gave his name to the Edwardian Age in English manners, fashion and literature
1847 Wilhemina Carstairs - The first child to be born with the aid of anaesthesia. The birth took place in Edinburgh, Scotland, where Dr. James Young Simpson used chloroform on her mother
1868 Marie Dressler – Canadian actress known as Tugboat Annie (Min and Bill, Dinner at Eight, Tugboat Annie, Tillie’s Punctured Romance) and author (The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling, My Own Story)
1881 Dr. Herbert Thomas Kalmus – US inventor of Technicolor
1886 Ed Wynn – Actor (The Ed Wynn Show, Mary Poppins, Marjorie Morningstar, The Diary of Anne Frank, Cinderfella, Babes in Toyland, The Absent-Minded Professor, That Darn Cat!, The Gnome-Mobile, The Red Skelton Show) He was the father of actor Keenan Wynn
1906 Mugsy Spanier – US coronet player who was one of the central figures in the development of the Chicago Dixieland throughout the 20’s and 30’s
1913 Hedy Lamarr – Vienna-born actress (Sampson and Delilah, Algiers, White Cargo) Lamarr and composer George Antheil co-invented a radio guiding system for torpedoes. They were awarded US Patent #2,292,387, for a "Secret Communication System," in August 1942. This seminal invention was the first instance of spread-spectrum communications based on frequency-hopping techniques. Lamarr brought up the idea of radio control, which was not new, but her concept of frequency hopping was. Antheil's contribution was to suggest the device by which synchronisation could be achieved
1923 Dorothy Dandridge - Actress (Island in the Sun, Carmen Jones, Porgy and Bess)
1934 Carl Sagan – US astronomer and author (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Cosmos, Contact)
1936 Mary Travers – US singer with the group Peter, Paul and Mary (Leaving on a Jet Plane, Puff the Magic Dragon, I Dig Rock 'n' Roll Music)
1941 Tom Fogerty - Musician, songwriter and singer with Creedence Clearwater Revival (Bad Moon Rising, Down on the Corner, Proud Mary, Lookin' Out My Back Door)
1945 Charles Robinson – Actor (Night Court, Beouwulf, Antwone Fisher, Love & War, Buffalo Bill, Flamingo Road)
1947 Robert David Hall – Actor (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, The Negotiator, Starship Troopers)
1952 Lou Ferrigno - Bodybuilder (Mr. Universe) and actor (The Incredible Hulk)
1955 Karen Dotrice – British Actress (Mary Poppins, The Three Lives of Thomasina, The Gnome-Mobile, Upstairs Downstairs) She is the daughter of Roy Dotrice
1964 Robert Duncan McNeill – Actor (Star Trek: Voyager, Masters of the Universe) and director (Chuck, Las Vegas, Enterprise, Dawson’s Creek)


Died this Day

1888 Mary Jane Kelly, aged 25 – Irish-born London part-time prostitute. She died around 3:30am, near Millers Court in London’s Whitechapel. She was the last known victim of Jack the Ripper. Of all his victims' corpses, Kelly's was the most hideously mutilated
1940 Neville Chamberlain, aged 71 – British Prime Minister. He is best remembered for his policy of appeasement toward Hitler in the pre-war years, supporting Germany's territorial demands in Czechoslovakia, convinced that it would avert war. Returning to England from Munich, Chamberlain boasted the notoriously naïve claim, "I believe it is peace for our time." When Germany invaded Poland in September, 1939, Chamberlain issued an ultimatum to Hitler to immediately withdraw from Poland. Hitler ignored the ultimatum, and two days later, Chamberlain declared war. By this point, Britain's faith in its Prime Minister was diminishing quickly. In May 1940, one of Chamberlain's supporters stood up in Parliament session and quoted Oliver Cromwell: "Depart, I say, and let us have done with you! In the name of God, go!" Chamberlain was driven from the House amid unanimous chants of "Go! Go! Go!" and was succeeded by Winston Churchill
1953 Dylan Thomas – Welsh playwright, poet and short story writer (The Three Weird Sisters, Under Milkwood, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night) He died in New York, two weeks after his 39th birthday
2003 Art Carney – Actor (The Jackie Gleason Show: The Honeymooners, Harry and Tonto, Last Action Hero, Izzy and Moe, House Calls, Roadie, Firestarter, Take this Job and Shove It, The Art Carney Special, Terrible Joe Moran) He played The Archer on the Batman TV series He died 5 days after his 85th birthday


On this Day

1789 In Québec, an Order-in-Council gave every son of a Loyalist 200 acres, and every daughter 200 acres when she married. Descendants of Loyalists are entitled to put letters the U.E. (United Empire) after their names
1859 From this day on, flogging was no longer permitted in the British Army
1906 On the first foreign trip by a US president in history, President Theodore Roosevelt departed the US for Panama aboard the battleship Louisiana. The visit came three years after Roosevelt gave tacit US military support to the Panamanian revolt against Colombian rule. Panamanian independence allowed US engineers to begin work on the Panama Canal project to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans with a US-administered canal across the Isthmus of Panama. During his four days in Panama, Roosevelt visited the project site, where construction preparations were underway. After leaving Panama, Roosevelt travelled to the US territory of Puerto Rico before returning to the US
1918 The Kaiser abdicated and Germany was proclaimed a republic
1938 All over Germany, Austria, and other Nazi-controlled areas, organised bands of Nazis participated in the attack known as Krystallnacht, or Crystal Night, so named after all the broken glass littering the streets. Two days earlier, a 17-year-old Jew living in France, shot and killed a member of the German embassy staff in Paris. The youth was acting in retaliation for the poor treatment his father and family suffered at the hands of the Nazis in Germany. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler used the Paris shooting as an opportunity to begin a long-planned attack on Jews living in Nazi-controlled areas. Nazi troops and sympathisers destroyed and looted 7,500 Jewish businesses, burned 267 synagogues, killed 91 Jews, and rounded up over 25,000 Jewish men, who were later sent to concentration camps. Three days later, the Nazi authorities declared that Jews must pay for the violence that they supposedly provoked, and they were charged one billion marks in damages for the Paris killing, and six million marks to cover insurance fees for the destroyed shops. The reaction outside Germany was shock and outrage, and the US removed its ambassador to Germany
1942 Canada broke off relations with the Nazi puppet state of Vichy, France, during the Second World War
1951 The first US underground atomic bomb explosion took place in Frenchman Flat, Nevada
1961 Brian Epstein went to a lunchtime session at The Cavern in Liverpool to see for himself why his record shop was receiving so many requests for records by a group that had apparently made none. When he saw and heard The Beatles, he decided to be their manager
1965 At dusk, the biggest power failure to that date occurred as all of New York State, portions of 7 neighbouring states, and parts of eastern Canada were plunged into darkness. The power lines from Niagara Falls to New York City were operating near their maximum capacity when the Great Northeast Blackout began, at the height of rush hour. At 5:16 pm, a 230-kilovolt-transmission line in upstate New York, near Ontario, Canada, tripped, causing several other heavily loaded lines to also fail, precipitating a redirection in the normal flow of electric power from its usual northerly direction, toward Toronto, to a southerly direction, draining 64% of Ontario Hydro's capacity. The resulting surge of power overwhelmed the transmission lines in western New York, causing a cascading tripping of additional lines and resulting in the eventual break-up of the entire North-eastern power grid. Altogether, thirty million people in eight US states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Québec were affected by the blackout, lasting in places for up to 13-1/2 hours. Within a few hours, power was restored to the majority of the blackout areas, and by morning, power had been restored throughout the Northeast. Millions of commuters were delayed, and thousands of people were stranded in elevators, subway cars and streetcars for hours. Most remained cheerful, and more than a few became romantic, with the birth rate booming nine months later
1989 Several weeks after the resignation of Erich Honecker, East Germany's Communist head of state since 1976, the East German government opened it borders to West Germany, and allowed thousands of its citizens to pass freely through the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall was first erected in 1961 to stem the flood of East German refugees escaping to democratic West Germany via the Western occupation zone in Berlin. Berliners from both sides of the infamous Cold War division greeted the opening of the Berlin Wall with jubilation, and thousands celebrated by climbing on top of the wall, painting graffiti on its face, and removing fragments as souvenirs. The next day bulldozers moved in and East German troops begin demolishing the 28 year old barrier. Less than a year later, East and West Germany were formally reunited
1995 Bill Watterson announced he would end the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes as of December 31st.