Born this Day

1694 Francois-Marie Arouet (Voltaire) – French author (Candide), philosopher and satirist who crusaded against tyranny and bigotry. He was born in Paris to a treasury officer and his wife. Voltaire studied law but abandoned it to become a writer, winning success with his plays. His writing brought him some measure of success, and his wise investments made him wealthy in his mid-30s. His epic poem La Henriade, a satirical attack on politics and religion, infuriated the government and landed Voltaire in the Bastille for nearly a year in 1717. Voltaire's time in prison failed to quench his satire, and in 1726, he again displeased authorities and fled to England. He returned several years later and continued to write plays. In 1734, his Lettres Philosophiques criticized established religions and political institutions, and he was forced to flee once more. He retreated to the region of Champagne, where he lived with his mistress and patroness, Madame du Châtelet. In 1750, he moved to Berlin on the invitation of Frederick II of Prussia and later settled in Switzerland
1787 Sir Samuel Cunard – Canadian merchant and ship owner, born at Halifax Nova Scotia. As a youth Cunard demonstrated remarkable business acumen. When only 17, he began managing his own general store. After joining his father, Abraham, in the timber business, he gradually expanded the family interests into coal, iron, shipping and whaling. He was a founder of the Halifax Bank, and in 1838 he founded the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, later known as the Cunard Line
1860 Tom Horn – Notorious hired killer, born in Memphis, Missouri. "Killing is my specialty," Horn reportedly once said. "I look at it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market." Horn's career as a hired gunman began legitimately when he signed up with the well-known Chicago-based Pinkerton Detective Agency, which supplied agents to serve as armed guards and private police forces. Though Pinkerton detectives generally stopped short of carrying out actual murders, they were sometimes called on to fight gun battles with everyone from striking miners to train robbers
1902 Foster Hewitt – Canadian hockey broadcaster for the Toronto Maple Leafs. Hewitt, who coined the phrase "He shoots, he scores," called the first game from Toronto's Maple Leaf Gardens when it opened in 1931
1904 Coleman Hawkins – US virtuoso tenor saxophonist (Body and Soul) He played with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, and was the main influence in raising the saxophone to its current position of prominence
1933 Joseph Campanella - Actor (Original Intent, The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, The Lawyers, Ben, Meteor, The Colbys, Mannix)
1934 Beryl Bainbridge – British author (An Awfully Big Adventure, The Dressmaker, Sweet William, The Bottle Factory Outing)
1934 Laurence Luckinbill - Actor (StarTrek V: The Final Frontier, Dash and Lilly, Winner Take All) He is married to Lucie Arnaz
1937 Marlo Thomas - Actress (That Girl, Reunion, Nobody’s Child, The Lost Honour of Kathryn Beck) She is the wife of Phil Donahue and the daughter of Danny Thomas
1940 Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack) – Musician and singer (Right Place Wrong Time)
1941 Juliet Mills – British actress (Nanny and the Professor, QB VII, The Cracker Factory, The Challengers, Passions) She is the older sister of Hayley Mills, and the daughter of Sir John Mills
1944 Harold Ramis – Actor (Stripes, Ghostbusters, SCTV) and director (Caddyshack, Groundhog Day, Analyze This)
1945 Goldie Hawn – Actress (Private Benjamin, Shampoo, Cactus Flower, First Wives Club, Overboard, Laugh-In, Butterflies Are Free)
1952 Lorna Luft – Actress (My Giant, Where the Boys Are, Grease 2) She is the sister of Liza Minelli and daughter of Judy Garland
1962 Steven Curtis Chapman - Gospel singer (Lord of the Dance, Hiding Place, Not Home Yet, The Great Adventure)
1963 Nicollette Sheridan – British-born actress (Desperate Housewives, Knots Landing, Spy Hard, Paper Dolls)
1965 Björk – Icelandic singer (Oceania, I've Seen It All, All is Full of Love) and actress (Dancer in the Dark)
1965 Alexander Siddig – Sudanese actor (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Kingdom of Heaven, Poirot: Cards on the Table, 24, The Nativity Story, Clash of the Titans, Gotham)


Died this Day

1782 Jacques de Vaucanson – French inventor of automata, or robot devices. He produced a mechanical duck, which not only imitated the motions of a live duck, but also the motions of drinking, eating, and "digesting"
1913 Keiki Tokugawa – Japanese prince who was the last of the Shoguns. His family established the shogunate in the 16th century
1916 Franz Joseph – Emperor of Austria
1937 Howard E. Coffin, age 64 – US entrepreneur who founded the Hudson Motor Company along with Joseph L. Hudson in 1909. He died from an accidental gunshot wound at Sea Island Beach in Georgia. Coffin served as vice-president and chief engineer of Hudson from 1909 to 1930, and was responsible for a number of Hudson's important automotive innovations, including the placement of the steering wheel on the left side and dual brakes


On this Day

1763 General James Murray was appointed Governor-in-Chief of Canada. He had been made governor of Québec when the territory was occupied during the Seven Years War, but under the Peace of Paris, Québec was given to Canada and he became Governor-in-Chief. Murray clashed with the British and Yankee merchants who swarmed into Quebec, because he would not violate his promises to the French. Recalled to England in 1766 to face charges of partiality, he saw the charges dismissed, but never went back to Canada, although he held his post until 1768
1766 The Southfork, the first theatre in the US, opened in Philadelphia
1783 The first manned free-flight was made by Jean de Rosier and the Marquis d’Arlandes in the Montgolfier brothers’ hot-air balloon. They flew over Paris and landed a few miles south after a 25 minute flight. Their cloth balloon was crafted by French papermaking brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph Michel Montgolfier, who believed smoke, not hot air, caused balloons to rise. Fuelling the balloon's burner with a combination of damp straw, rotting meat, and rags, Rozier and d'Arlandes ascended as high as 3,000 feet, before returning safely to earth. The previous month, Rozier was the first human passenger aboard a rising balloon, when he rose eighty feet in a tethered Montgolfier-made balloon, and four months before that, a duck, a rooster, and a sheep each successfully took a ride on a Montgolfier hot air balloon
1784 Thomas Carleton, New Brunswick's first governor, arrived at Parrton to proclaim the new province
1789 North Carolina became the 12th state of the Union
1831 Michael Farady read his first series of papers at the Royal Society in London on the subject of Experimental Research into Electricity
1843 Thomas Hancock patented vulcanized rubber in Britain. In 1825, he had produced the first toy balloons in Britain, consisting of a bottle of rubber solution and a condensing syringe
1877 Inventor Thomas Edison announced the invention of the "talking machine", which later became known as the phonograph
1899 The first automobile appeared on the streets of Montreal. It was a “Crestomobile”
1916 Forty people died when the Royal Navy hospital ship HMS Brittanic was torpedoed in the Aegean Sea. It was one of two sister ships of the doomed liner Titanic. Like the Titanic, it never saw New York
1921 In London, England, King George V proclaimed Canada's Coat of Arms, and designated white and red as the official Canadian colours
1942 The US Army Corps of Engineers, working with the Public Roads Administration, completed the Alcan Highway, an overland military supply route to the US territory of Alaska, and a link between airfields in Canada and Alaska. The project was an emergency war measure to provide greater protection for Alaska and northwestern Canada against attack by Japanese forces. Completed in less than ten months, the Alcan Highway, named after an acronym for Alaska and Canada, stretched more than 1,500 miles from Sawson Creek, British Colombia, to Fairbanks, Alaska. In the following year, the road was improved upon by private contractors, and in 1948, three years after the end of World War II, the entire route was opened to civilian traffic. Today, the Alcan Highway is known as the Alaska Highway
1950 A Canadian military troop train collided with a Canadian National Railway passenger train at Canoe River, BC, after failing to get off on a siding. Twenty-one were killed, including 4 engine crew, and fifty-three were injured. The soldiers were all members of the 2nd Regiment Royal Canadian Horse Artillery, bound from Camp Shilo, Manitoba, to Fort Lewis, Washington, for winter training prior to going to Korea. None of the east-bound passengers on the other train were injured but their baggage and express cars were derailed. The wreck was the result of a mistake on the part of a CNR dispatcher, who wired the troop train to pull into Blue River instead of Canoe River. Charges were dismissed because of the courtroom skill of the dispatcher's lawyer, future Canadian Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker
1953 The discovery of The Piltdown Man skull by Charles Dawson in Sussex in 1912 was finally revealed as a hoax
1969 The first ARPANET link was put into service. The network connected a computer at the University of California at Los Angeles with one at the Stanford Research Institute. The ARPANET evolved into the Internet in the early 1970s - and where would we all be without it!!!
1973 During the Watergate affair, an eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap was discovered during a subpoenaed recording of an official White House conversation between President Richard M. Nixon and White House staff member H.R. Haldeman. Two months later, an expert testified before the House Judiciary Committee that the gap was caused by deliberate and repeated erasures