Born this Day

1670 William Congreve - English Restoration dramatist (The Way of the World, The Double Dealer, The Old Bachelor, The Mourning Bride)
1775 Charles Lamb - British writer and essayist (Tales From Shakespeare, The Last Essays of Elia, Prince Dorus)
1890 Gilbert Labine - Canadian prospector who is known for his discovery of the pitchblende (radium) deposits on Great Bear Lake in Canada's North West Territories in 1930. He established the Eldorado refinery in Port Hope, Ontario in 1933. His company was secretly nationalised in 1944, and production used to fuel the first atomic bombs that pulverised Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945
1890 Boris Pasternak - Russian novelist and poet (Dr. Zhivago)
1892 Alan Hale – Actor (The Adventures of Robin Hood, It Happened One Night, The Sea Hawk, Destination Tokyo, God is My Co-Pilot, Gentleman Jim) He was the father of Alan Hale Jr
1893 Jimmy Durante - US vaudevillian, actor and comedian whose trademark phrase was, "Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." (Ziegfeld Follies, The Man Who Came to Dinner, It Happened in Brooklyn, The Jimmy Durante Show)
1898 Bertold Brecht - German poet and playwright (The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage)
1898 Dame Judith Anderson - Australian born actress (The Ten Commandments, Star Trek 3, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Man Called Horse)
1902 Walter Brattain - Scientist who, together with William Shockley and John Bardeen, invented the transistor. The three shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956 for the transistor and for their work on semiconductors. The transistor replaced the bulky vacuum tubes previously used in electronics and paved the way for all later microelectronics
1905 Lon Chaney, Jr. - Actor (The Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, Dracula vs. Frankenstein, The Mummy's Curse, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, High Noon)
1914 Larry Adler - US born composer and harmonica virtuoso (A Cry from the Streets, Genevieve, Great Chase)
1922 Neva Patterson - Actress (An Affair to Remember, The Runaways)
1927 Leontyne Price - Soprano with the Metropolitan Opera
1930 Robert Wagner - Actor (Hart to Hart, The Mountain, The Towering Inferno, Titanic, It Takes a Thief, Pink Panther, Midway, Colditz, Austin Powers) He was twice married to Natalie Wood
1939 Adrienne Clarkson - Hong Kong born Canadian broadcaster. Clarkson came to Canada with her parents in 1942 following the Japanese invasion. After getting an MA from the University of Toronto, she attended the Sorbonne in Paris, then returned to Toronto in 1965, where she started her TV career with the CBC (Take Thirty, Adrienne at Large, The Fifth Estate, Adrienne Clarkson Presents) She is a former Governor-General of Canada
1940 Roberta Flack - Singer (The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, Feel Like Making Love, Killing Me Softly With His Song)
1943 Ral Donner - Singer (You Don't Know What You've Got, She's Everything)
1946 Donovan (Leitch) - Scottish singer (Mellow Yellow, Sunshine Superman)
1949 Harold Sylvester – Actor (Married with Children, City of Angels, The Army Show, Corrina Corrina, Innerspace, Walking Tall)
1963 Philip Glenister – British actor (Calendar Girls, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Mad Dogs, Cranford, The Other Boleyn Girl, Clocking Off, Vanity Fair, Wycliffe) He is the brother of actor Robert Glenister
1967 Laura Dern - Actress (Jurassic Park, Blue Velvet, Fat Man and Little Boy) She is the daughter of Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd
1976 Keeley Hawes – British actress (Death at a Funeral, Spooks/MI-5, Identity, Ashes to Ashes, Marple: A Murder is Announced, Wives and Daughters, Our Mutual Friend, The Moonstone, The Beggar Bride, Karaoke, Cold Lazarus, The Durrells in Corfu, Mrs. Wilson) She is married to actor Matthew Macfadyen


Died this Day

1567 Lord Darnley - Second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, and father of King James I. He was murdered near Edinburgh and the killer or killers used gunpowder to blow up their victim
1868 Sir David Brewster, age 86 - Scottish physician who invented the kaleidoscope
1912 Joseph Lister, age 84 - British surgeon who introduced antiseptics which revolutionised modern surgery
1923 Wilhelm Conrad von Roentgen - German physicist who discovered X-rays
1957 Laura Ingalls Wilder - US author (Little House on the Prairie series of books) She died three days after her 90th birthday
1992 Alex Haley, age 70 - Author (Roots: The Saga of an American Family) He died of a heart attack, in Seattle


On this Day

1354 Oxford University students clashed with the townspeople in a three day street battle. There were several deaths and many injuries until the students were overpowered
1763 Canada passed from French control into the British Empire with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. The treaty, which ended the Seven Years War, stripped France of all her possessions north of what became the US, except for the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, which remain under French control to this day
1774 Andrew Becker demonstrated his practical diving suit in the Thames River
1802 Alexander Mackenzie was knighted for his achievements in the North West, and for being the first to cross the North American continent by land, reaching the Pacific Ocean in 1793
1829 King's College, Fredericton, now the University of New Brunswick, was given a royal charter
1840 Britain's Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg-Gotha
1841 Upper and Lower Canada were united under one constitution, as the Province of Canada, with Kingston as the capital
1846 Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons, began their exodus to the western US from Illinois
1862 British poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti returned from a night out with his fellow poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and found his wife dead from an overdose of laudanum. He had married the beautiful model Elizabeth Siddal only two years earlier. Devastated by his lost, Rossetti buried the only complete manuscript of his poetry with her. The manuscript was later recovered and published eight years later, in 1870, twelve years before Rossetti's own death. Rossetti was born in 1828 into an extraordinarily talented family. His sister, Christina Rossetti, became a well-known poet, and his brother, William, became a prominent art critic and editor. Dante Rossetti, put off by his father's passionate politics, came to believe that art and literature should pursue beauty for beauty's sake and not try to be moral, instructive, or politically useful. Rossetti was already writing poetry and translating Italian verse by the time he was 20. He studied art and became a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters embracing art for art's sake. Rossetti contributed poems to the group's magazine, The Germ
1863 Showman P.T. Barnum staged the wedding of General Tom Thumb and Mercy Lavinia Warren, both midgets, in New York City
1870 The Young Women's Christian Association was formed
1889 The use of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was authorised for use in church services by the Church of England
1906 In British Columbia, Prince Rupert was chosen as the name of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway's terminus. Fifteen thousand people entered the $250 contest to choose a name for the town, and Eleanor Macdonald of Winnipeg was the winner
1906 In Glasgow, Scotland the HMS Dreadnought was launched. It was the first modern battleship, with fast turbine engines and large, standardised guns
1929 In Italy, the signing of the Lateran Treaty established an independent Vatican State in Rome
1933 The first singing telegram was introduced by the Postal Telegraph Company in New York
1941 The US's first highway post office service was established along the route between Washington, DC, and Harrisonburg, Virginia. Mail was transported in buses equipped with facilities for sorting, handling, and dispatch of mail
1942 RCA Victor presented Glenn Miller and his Orchestra with a gold record for their recording of Chattanooga Choo Choo, which had sold more than one million copies
1949 Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman opened at Broadway's Morosco Theatre
1962 The Soviet Union exchanged captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, a Soviet spy held by the US
1966 Ralph Nader testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganisation of the Senate Government Operations Committee. Nader attacked the automotive industry's unwillingness to consider the safety of the consumer, or as Nader put it, "insisting on maintaining the freedom to rank safety wherever it pleases on its list of considerations." General Motors responded to Nader's criticism by launching an investigation into his personal life and accusing Nader of being gay and anti-Semitic. Nader filed an invasion of privacy suit against GM and ultimately exacted $425,000 from the automotive giant. A hearing report released in May 1966 indicated that safety defects in the automobile industry were more pervasive than the public knew. The report and the publicity surrounding GM's actions led directly to the September 1966 passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act
1983 Canada agreed in principle to allow testing of US weapons over Canadian territory
1988 Sir John Gielgud made theatrical history when, after an absence of ten years from the stage, he played the longest role ever for an actor of his age. Just weeks away from his 84th birthday, he played Sydney Cockerell in The Best of Friends at the Apollo
1996 IBM's chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, won the first game of a six-game match against Gary Kasparov, the world's champion chess grandmaster. The computer evaluated 200 million chess moves per second. No computer had ever before defeated the top human player under championship conditions. Kasparov went on to win the match, winning three games and tying two. However, he lost a rematch held in New York City the following year, when he resigned the sixth and final match. Not only was this the first time a computer defeated a reigning human grandmaster, it was also the first time Kasparov ever lost a multigame match against any opponent