Born this Day

1713 Laurence Sterne – Irish clergyman and author (The Life and Times of Tristam Shandy, A Sentimental Journey, Letters From Yorick to Eliza)
1784 Zachary Taylor – 12th US President. He was born in Orange County, Virginia
1849 Frances Hodgson Burnett – British born author (Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Secret Garden, The Little Princess) She emigrated with her parents to Tennessee when she was in her teens
1849 John Froelich - Inventor of the first gasoline-powered farm tractor, born in Froelich, Iowa. Froelich's tractor, completed in 1892, featured a one-cylinder gasoline engine mounted on wooden beams to operate a threshing machine. Froelich manufactured several more tractors of this type during the year, and in September shipped one of his engine-powered tractors to a farm in Langford, South Dakota, where it was employed in agricultural activity for the first time
1864 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – French painter and lithographer. At age 14, he had a horse riding accident and broke both legs, which then failed to grow
1868 Scott Joplin – US composer and pianist who was known as the King of Ragtime (Maple Leaf Rag, The Entertainer) He was born in Texarkana, Arkansas
1888 Dale Carnegie – Lecturer and author (How To Win Friends and Influence People)
1903 Hans Popper – Austrian born hepatologist who, along with Dame Sheila Sherlock, founded the modern science of hepatology, the study of liver disorders
1913 Howard Duff – Actor (Mr. Adams and Eve, Boy’s Night Out, Kramer vs. Kramer, Flamingo Road, Dallas, War and Remembrance, East of Eden, Felony Squad, Mr. Adams and Eve, Knots Landing, Dante) His first wife was actress Ida Lupino. He appeared uncredited as himself in the Batman episode The Impractical Joker, and he portrayed Cabala in the Batman episode The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra
1914 Geraldine Fitzgerald – Irish born US actress (Wuthering Heights, Rachel Rachel, Harry and Tonto, Arthur)
1940 Johnny Carver - Singer (Yellow Ribbon, Don't Tell That Sweet Ole Lady of Mine, Tonight Someone's Falling in Love)
1941 Pete Best – Drummer. He was the original Beatles drummer who would be replaced by Ringo Starr
1942 Billy Connolly – Scottish comedian and actor (Mrs. Brown, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, Bullshot, Head of the Class)
1947 Dwight Schultz – Actor (The A-Team, Star Trek Next Generation, Fat Man and Little Boy) He was in the Perry Mason movies The Case of the Musical Murder and the Case of the Sinister Spirit. He also played Bassick in the 1981 TV movie, Sherlock Holmes
1950 Stanley Livingston - Actor (My Three Sons, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies)
1955 Clem Burke - Rock musician with Blondie (Call Me, Heart of Glass, Rapture, My T-Bird, The Tide is High)
1957 Denise Crosby - Actress (Star Trek Next Generation, Desert Hearts, Pet Sematary) She is the granddaughter of Bing Crosby
1968 Scott Krinsky – Actor (Chuck, The O.C.)
1978 Katherine Heigl – Actress (Grey’s Anatomy, The Ugly Truth, Life as We Know It, Roswell)


Died this Day

1572 John Knox – Founder of Scottish Presbyterianism
1807 Joseph Brant - Mohawk-Iroquois leader after whom Brantford, Ontario is named. He died at Wellington Square, now Burlington, Ontario. Brant fought on the British side in the War of American Independence and afterward led his tribe to the Grand River valley in Ontario. He was a Christian and translated Anglican services and scriptures into Mohawk
1922 Robert Erskine Childers – London born Irish author (The Riddle of the Sands) He was a member of the Irish Volunteers, a prototype of the IRA. After a year of leading the Irish Volunteer forces, Childers was captured and executed by an Irish Free State firing squad after being convicted of carrying a small pistol
1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, age 24 – Alleged assassin of US President John F. Kennedy. He was shot by Jack Ruby, a Dallas night-club owner, in the underground carpark of the Dallas Police Headquarters at 12:20 pm. While television cameras were rolling, Ruby emerged from the crowd of law enforcement officers and media representatives watching the transfer of Oswald to a county jail, and shot him dead. Millions witnessed the murder on live television. Jack Ruby, originally known as Jacob Rubenstein, operated night-clubs and dance halls in Dallas, and had at least minor connections to organised crime. In March of 1964, Ruby, who was apprehended immediately after the shooting, was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, but in October of 1966, a Texas appeals court overturned the conviction. In 1967, Ruby died while awaiting a second trial. Although some suspected that Ruby was part of a larger conspiracy in the assassination of Kennedy, such as the charge that he was hired by the mob or the CIA to silence Oswald, the official Warren Commission report of 1964 concluded that neither Oswald nor Ruby were part of a larger conspiracy, either domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy. However, the report failed to silence conspiracy theories surrounding the event, and in 1979 the House Assassination's Committee concluded that Kennedy likely was killed as part of a larger conspiracy that may have included members of organised crime, although many government officials dispute its findings
1991 Freddie Mercury, age 45 – Zanzibar-born singer with the group Queen (Killer Queen, We Are the Champions, Bohemian Rhapsody, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Another One Bites the Dust) He died at his home in London of AIDS related pneumonia


On this Day

1434 In a rare event, England’s Thames River froze over. Exactly 281 years later, in 1715, it froze again, hard enough for a Frost Fair to be held on the ice
1639 Astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks first observed the transit of Venus across the sun
1642 Dutch navigator Abel Tasman discovered Van Dieman’s Land, which he named after his captain. It was later renamed Tasmania
1859 British naturalist Charles Darwin published his work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a groundbreaking scientific work. Darwin's theory of natural selection argued that species are the result of a gradual biological evolution of living organisms in which nature encourages, through natural selection, those species best suited to their environments to propagate future descendants. Darwin, who was influenced by the work of French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, and later by English scientist Alfred Russel Wallace, acquired most of the evidence for his theory during a five-year surveying expedition aboard the HMS Beagle during the 1830s. Visiting such diverse places as Brazil, the Galapagos Islands, and New Zealand, Darwin acquired an intimate knowledge of the flora, fauna, wildlife, and geology of many lands. This information, along with his experiments with variation and interbreeding after returning to England, proved invaluable in the development of his theory of natural selection. His Origin of Species is the first significant work on the theory of evolution, and was greeted with great interest in the scientific world, although it was also violently attacked because it contradicted the account of Creation given in the Bible
1900 On this day, the first gasoline-powered Pierce automobile was taken on a test drive through the streets of Buffalo, New York. George N. Pierce first founded the Pierce Company in 1878 as a manufacturer of household items, but in the late 19th century became known for their high quality bicycles and decided to try their hand at automobile production. In 1909 US president William Howard Taft ordered two of their prestigious automobiles, a Brougham and a Landaulette, for use by the White House
1922 In Edmonton, Alberta, the City Council approved a by-law outlawing swearing in public, after receiving complaints from golfers on public courses
1962 In Britain, the satirical, ground-breaking, television programme, That Was the Week That Was, was broadcast live from the BBC. It was introduced by a new presenter, David Frost, with some material written by an equally unknown writer, John Cleese
1969 Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, successfully returned to earth, splashing down in the Pacific Ocean only three miles from one of its retrieval ships, the USS Hornet. Apollo 12 was launched ten days earlier, from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Charles Conrad Jr, Richard F. Gordon Jr, and Alan L. Bean aboard
1971 A hijacker who came to be known as D.B. Cooper parachuted from a Northwest Airlines 727 over Washington State with $200,000 in ransom into a raging thunderstorm. Cooper commandeered the aircraft shortly after takeoff, showing a flight attendant something that looked like a bomb and informing the crew that he wanted $200,000, several parachutes, and "no funny stuff." The plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where authorities met Cooper's demands and evacuated most of the passengers. Cooper then ordered the plane to fly toward Mexico via Reno, Nevada, at a low altitude, and ordered the remaining crew into the cockpit. At 8:13 pm, as the plane flew over the Lewis River in south-west Washington at an altitude of 10,000 feet, the plane's pressure gauge recorded Cooper's jump from the aircraft. Wearing only wrap-around sunglasses, a thin suit, and a raincoat, Cooper parachuted into a raging thunderstorm with winds in excess of 150 mph and temperatures below zero. The storm prevented an immediate capture, and many authorities assumed he was killed during his suicidal parachute jump. No trace of Cooper was found during a massive search that continued for eighteen days, however, in 1980 an eight-year-old boy uncovered a stack of nearly $6,000 of the ransom money in the sand along the Columbia River, five miles from Vancouver, Washington