Born this Day

1765 Robert Fulton – US engineer who built the first US submarine in 1800. He also developed the first commercially viable steamboat, the Clermont
1840 Claude Monet – French Impressionist painter (Water Lilies, La Grenouillere, Impression: Sunrise, Old St. Lazare Station, Paris) He gave the Impressionist movement its name
1863 Leo Hendrik Baekeland – Belgian-born US chemist who invented the first commercial plastic, which he named Bakelite
1891 Sir Frederick Grant Banting – Canadian physician, who with Charles Best, discovered insulin in 1921. He was born in Alliston, Ontario, and took his medical training at the University of Toronto. Banting and Best were working at U of T in the laboratory of Scottish physiologist J.J R. Macleod when Banting discovered the pancreatic hormone insulin, used in treating diabetes. The following year he and Macleod won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Objecting to the credit given Macleod, who had not participated in the discovery, Banting shared his half with Best
1900 Aaron Copland – US composer who is credited on many film scores (The Heiress, Of Mice and Men, Our Town, The Red Pony)
1908 Joseph McCarthy – US senator who led the Senate enquiry into alleged communists in the 1950’s which resulted in many being blacklisted. He was found to be falsifying evidence, which put an end to his hearings
1910 Rosemary DeCamp – Actress (Rhapsody in Blue, The Bob Cummings Show, That Girl, On Moonlight Bay, The Life of Riley, Petticoat Junction, That Girl)
1911 Frank Radford Crawley – Canadian filmmaker (The Entertainers, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, The Rowdyman, Janice)
1915 Martha Tilton - Singer (And the Angels Sing, A Stranger in Town) and actress (The Benny Goodman Story, Sunny)
1919 Veronica Lake – Actress (The Blue Dahlia, This Gun for Hire, So Proudly We Hail!, Footprints in the Snow)
1920 Johnny Desmond – Singer (Yellow Rose of Texas, Play Me Hearts and Flowers) and actor (Say Darling, Funny Girl, China Doll)
1921 Brian Keith – Actor (The Parent Trap, Family Affair, Hardcastle & McCormick, The Young Philadelphians, Young Guns, Centennial, The Loneliest Runner)
1924 Phyllis Avery - Actress (The George Gobel Show, Mr. Novak)
1927 McLean Stevenson – Actor ( M*A*S*H, Hello Larry, The Tim Conway Comedy Hour, The Doris Day Show, Condo)
1948 King Charles III – Monarch of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, including Australia and Canada. He was formerly the Prince of Wales
1959 Paul McGann - British actor (Forgotten, Horatio Hornblower, Fish, Nature Boy, Our Mutual Friend, Doctor Who: Enemy Within, The Three Musketeers, Alien³, Withnail and I, Empire of the Sun) He is the brother of actors Mark, Stephen and Joe McGann
1962 Laura San Giacomo – Actress (Just Shoot Me!, Quigly Down Under, Pretty Woman, Saving Grace)
1972 Josh Duhamel – Actor (Las Vegas, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, All My Children)
1981 Russell Tovey – British actor (Being Human, The History Boys, Little Dorrit, Marple: Murder is Easy, Poirot: Evil Under the Sun, Quantico, Flesh and Blood)


Died this Day

1905 Robert Whitehead, aged 82 – British inventor of the self-propelled torpedo in 1866
1909 Joshua Slocum, age 65 – Canadian sea captain, adventurer and author (Sailing Alone Around the World, Voyage of the Liberdade, Voyage of the Destroyer) Slocum was born in Nova Scotia and went to sea at age 16, serving in merchant ships to Europe and the Far East. In 1893 he rebuilt a 13 ton, 36 foot New England oyster sloop, The Spray, and from April 1895 to June 1898 sailed solo around the world, the first man in history to do so. He died at sea
1988 Jaromir Vejvoda – Czech song composer (The Beer Barrel Polka)


On this Day

1606 The first dramatic performance in Canada was held at the Harbourside in Port Royal. The performance also marked the first anniversary of the establishment of the first French settlement at Port Royal, now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. The drama, entitled Neptune's Theatre, was staged in canoes outside the fort, complete with verses in French, Gascon and Micmac. The play was a “jovial spectacle” wherein King Neptune arrives in a floating chariot drawn by six tritons, to the sound of trumpets and cannons. Neptune greets Samuel de Champlain, as he returns to Port-Royal
1770 Scottish explorer James Bruce discovered the source of the Blue Nile in north-east Ethiopia, which was then considered the main stream of the Nile
1832 The first streetcar, a horse-drawn vehicle called the John Mason, went into operation in New York City. It held 30 passengers and the fare was 12-½¢
1835 Canada's first insane asylum was opened, at Saint John, New Brunswick
1849 Toronto, in Upper Canada became the new seat of the Union government after a Tory mob had burned the Montreal Parliament buildings
1851 Herman Melville's novel, Moby Dick, was first published in the US by Harper & Brothers in New York. The book flopped, and it was many years before the book was recognised as a US classic
1889 Nellie Bly, New York World’s star female reporter, set sail from New York to beat Phileas Fogg’s “Around the World in 80 Days” record described in Jules Verne’s classic novel. She filed stories during her travels and ran a competition for readers to guess what her time would be, attracting nearly one million entries. She did it in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds, having travelled by sea, on sampans, on horseback, by rail and by road
1896 The speed limit for horseless carriages in Britain was raised to 14 m.p.h. It had been 4 m.p.h. in rural areas, and 2 m.p.h. in towns
1902 While on a hunting trip in Mississippi, US President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot an old bear which had been attacked by hunting dogs and tied to a tree. Roosevelt, a noted hunting enthusiast, had been hunting unsuccessfully for three days, when a hunting guide decided to ensure the hunt was a “success,” but the President declined the unsportsmanlike opportunity. News of Roosevelt's fair play soon spread nation-wide, and Washington Post political cartoonist Clifford Berryman, produced a wildly popular cartoon of the incident. New York City shopkeeper Morris Michtom was further inspired by the cartoon, and Mrs. Michtom produced two stuffed bears for sale in their shop, receiving Roosevelt’s permission to call them "Teddy's bears." Their operation eventually became Ideal Toy Corp. The bears quickly became a nation-wide fad, and an enduring pop-culture symbol that has long outlasted its inspiration and namesake
1910 Eugene Ely made the first take off in an aircraft from the deck of a US light cruiser
1935 Following the approval of a new constitution by the Philippine people, the Commonwealth of the Philippines was officially proclaimed by the first Philippine president, Luis Manuel Quezon, and US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. The US commonwealth status of the Philippines was adopted as part of the Tydings-McDuffie Act, a US resolution that called for the gradual transition toward complete Philippine independence by 1946. On July 4, 1946, despite the four-year Japanese occupation during World War II, the Philippines achieved full independence for the first time in over four hundred years
1940 Five-hundred German bombers left Germany for Coventry, Great Britain. The air raid followed Hitler's public promise, after the British bombing of Munich the previous week, that "an attack on the capital of the Nazi movement would not go unpunished." German bombers decimated the city—dropping 150,000 fire bombs and 503 tons of high explosives, as well as 130 parachute mines. Seven vital war factories in Coventry were hit, halting production for months. The bombardment also caused a firestorm that levelled the city centre, and 60,000 of the city's 75,000 buildings were destroyed or badly damaged. Most of the 554 people killed were too badly burned to be identified and were buried in a communal grave
1943 During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and all of the US's top military brass, narrowly escaped disaster aboard the US battleship Iowa, when a live torpedo was accidentally fired at them from the US destroyer William D. Porter. The William D. Porter was one of the crafts escorting them across the Atlantic. The Iowa was just east of Bermuda at the time of the incident, en route to the Big Three Conference in Teheran, Iran, where Roosevelt was to meet with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. To demonstrate to the president and his guests the defensive abilities of the Iowa, the battleship launched a series of weather balloons to use as anti-aircraft targets. On the nearby William D. Porter, Captain Wilfred Walker ordered his men to battle stations, and the ship began shooting down the balloons that the Iowa had missed. A simulated torpedo firing was ordered, and the torpedo room obliged. Unfortunately, torpedoer Lawton Dawson had neglected to disarm torpedo tube #3, and an actual torpedo was fired toward the Iowa. Moments later, the William D. Porter broke mandatory radio silence to inform the Iowa that the speeding torpedo was headed their way. The Iowa rapidly began evasive maneuvers, as all guns turned on the William D. Porter. Meanwhile, on the bridge of the Iowa, word of the firing reached President Roosevelt, who asked that his wheelchair be moved to the ship's railing so that he could watch the torpedo's approach. Fortunately, the torpedo exploded behind the ship's massive wake. After the incident, the William D. Porter was ordered to return to Bermuda, and Captain Walker and the entire crew were arrested by a force of Marines upon docking. Torpedoer Lawton Dawson was subsequently court-martialed. The destroyer William D. Porter eventually reentered service, and was often hailed with the greeting "Don't shoot, we're Republicans" when she entered port or joined other naval ships
1944 Tommy Dorsey and Orchestra recorded Opus No. 1 for RCA Victor
1945 The Indianapolis Motor Speedway got a second chance when Tony Hulman purchased it from Edward Rickenbacher for $750,000. The speedway was in a deplorable condition after four years of disuse during World War II, and Rickenbacher had been considering tearing the facilities down and selling the land
1963 A volcanic eruption under the sea off Iceland created the new island of Surtsey
1969 The BBC began airing colour television programmes
1969 Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, was launched at 11:22 A.M. from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr., Richard F. Gordon, Jr., and Alan L. Bean aboard. Due to rainy conditions in the area, Apollo 12 was hit with an electrical charge 36.5 seconds after lift-off, briefly resulting in a power failure in the spacecraft, but fortunately not in the launching rocket. Shortly thereafter, power was restored, and five days later astronauts Conrad and Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the surface of the moon, after their landing module, Intrepid, touched down on the lunar plain of the Ocean of Storms. Over the next fifteen-and-a-half hours, the two astronauts made two lunar walks, where they collected lunar samples and investigated the Surveyor 3 spacecraft, an unmanned US probe that soft-landed on the moon in 1967. Five days later, Apollo 12 successfully returned to earth, splashing down only three miles from one of its retrieval ships, the USS Hornet
1973 Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey. However, they divorced in 1992, and Anne re-married