Born this Day

1766 Thomas Robert Malthus - British economist and demographer who wrote An Essay on the Principles of Population which saw famine, disease and disaster as a method of controlling the earth's fast-growing population
1803 Eli and John Phipps - Twins born in Virginia who lived for more than 108 years. The odds against both twins living that long are more than 700-million to one
1819 Christopher Latham Scholes - US mechanical engineer who invented the first practical modern typewriter with partners S.W. Soule and G. Glidden. It was patented in 1868, and manufactured by the Remington Arms Company in 1873. The type-bar system and the universal keyboard were the machine's novelty, but the keys jammed easily. To solve the jamming problem, another business associate, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to slow down typing. This became today's standard "QWERTY" keyboard
1877 Greenleaf Whittier Pickard - US electrical engineer and radio pioneer who invented the crystal detector, a key component in early radio and a forerunner of the transistor. In addition, Pickard was one of the first scientists to demonstrate the wireless electromagnetic transmission of speech when, in 1899, he transmitted a spoken message over a distance of ten miles
1894 Jack Benny – US comedian whose persona was the stingy, violin playing, perrenial-39-year-old of radio, television and vaudeville
1905 Thelma Ritter – Actress (All About Eve, The Mating Season, With a Song in My Heart, Pillow Talk, Rear Window, How the West Was Won)
1913 Jimmy Hoffa – Teamsters Union leader who disappeared in 1975
1916 Edward Platt – Actor (Get Smart, North by Northwest, Rebel Without a Cause, Atlantis the Lost Continent, The Gift of Love, Oregon Passage)
1921 Hugh Downs – TV host and journalist (The Jack Paar Show, Concentration, Today, 20/20)
1921 Skeezix Wallet - Comic strip character who was discovered on the doorstep of Walt and Phyllis Wallet in the strip Gasoline Alley
1927 Lois Maxwell – Canadian-born actress (Hard to Forget , Adventures in Rainbow Country, The Ambassadors, The Haunting, Lolita, Mantrap) She is best known for playing Miss Moneypenny in numerous James Bond movies
1929 Vic Morrow – Actor (Combat!, The Blackboard Jungle, The Bad News Bears, Twilight Zone: The Movie) He was the father of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh
1931 Boom Boom (Bernie) Geoffrion - Canadian hockey great who played with the Montréal Canadiens. He was the second player in NHL history to score 50 goals in one season
1931 Phyllis McGuire - Singer with The McGuire Sisters (Sincerely, Sugartime)
1934 Florence Henderson - Singer, actress (The Brady Bunch, Today, Song of Norway)
1936 Andrew Prine - Actor (The Miracle Worker, Gettysburg, The Devil's Brigade)
1944 Carl Bernstein - US journalist who was instrumental in breaking the Watergate story with Bob Woodward
1946 Gregory Hines - Actor-dancer (Bojangles, Wolfen, The Cotton Club, White Nights, Tap) He grew up as a member of the tap dancing trio Hines, Hines & Dad, with his father and brother
1948 (Raymond Joseph) Teller - Half of the comedy/magic team with his partner Penn Jillette
1952 Anton Lesser – British actor (Endeavour, Game of Thrones, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Garrow’s Law, Little Dorrit, Poirot: Cat Among the Pigeons, London, Dickens, Lorna Doone, Vanity Fair, Invasion: Earth, The Politician’s Wife)
1960 Meg Tilly - Actress (Agnes of God, The Big Chill, Valmont, The Two Jakes)
1963 Enrico Colantoni – Canadian actor (Galaxy Quest, Flashpoint, Just Shoot Me!, Contagion, The Kennedys, Veronica Mars)
1969 Helen Baxendale - British actress (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Friends, Cold Feet)
1970 Simon Pegg – British actor (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Burke and Hare, StarTrek, Mission: Impossible III, Big Train, Band of Brothers, Faith in the Future)
1983 Julia Ling – Actress (Chuck, Love Sick Diaries, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip)


Died this Day

AD 270 St. Valentine - Whose death is commemorated on Valentine's Day
1779 Captain James Cook - British explorer and navigator. He was apparently embroiled in an argument over a stolen boat when he was clubbed and stabbed by Hawaiian natives who had appeared to trust him. This happened during his third visit to the Pacific Island group
1884 Martha Bullock Roosevelt, age 48 and Alice Hathaway Roosevelt, age 22, the mother and the first wife of future President Teddy Roosevelt. His mother, Martha, died of typhoid fever at three o’clock in the morning. Eleven hours later his wife, Alice, passed away from undiagnosed Bright’s disease. Two days earlier Alice had given birth to their only child, a daughter, named Alice after her mother. Four years earlier the couple had happily announced their Valentine’s Day engagement.
1891 William Tecumseh Sherman, age 71 - Union General and US Civil War military commander
1975 Sir P.G. Wodehouse, age 93 - British author who is best known for his series of stories about Bertie Wooster and his valet, Jeeves. He also wrote the lyrics to a number of musical comedies with Cole Porter, Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. He was knighted only weeks before his death


On this Day

1477 Margery Brews sent a letter to John Paston in Norfolk, England addressed "To my right welbelovyed Voluntyne", the world's first known Valentine
1663 Canada became a Royal Province of France
1761 British troops occupied Fort Michilimackinac in Michigan
1778 The US ship Ranger carried the recently adopted Stars and Stripes to a foreign port for the first time as it arrived in France
1842 In New York, fans of Charles Dickens organised the Boz Ball, an elite party for the celebrated writer who had arrived in the US in January for a five-month tour. The Boz Ball was so named because Dickens' earliest works had been published under the pseudonym Boz. Only members of New York's aristocracy were invited to the ball, with each guest's background and pedigree thoroughly inspected. Tickets were priced at the outrageous sum of $10. The event, held at the Park Theatre in New York, sold out, and event organisers later held two more sold-out balls, open to the general public
1859 Oregon became the 33rd state of the Union
1876 Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both applied separately for US patents related to the telephone. The US Supreme Court eventually ruled that Bell was the rightful inventor
1879 La Marseillaise became the national anthem of France
1886 Destined to become one of the state's major exports, the first trainload of oranges grown by southern California farmers left Los Angeles via the transcontinental railroad. Southern California proved an ideal environment for growing many crops, particularly valuable fruits like oranges. During the 1870s and 1880s, state railroad lines linking Los Angeles into the new system of transcontinental railways created additional moneymaking opportunities. Settlers, tourists, and health seekers all boarded trains to travel to the Pacific, where the sunny climate and beautiful scenery promised a new and better life. The healthful new California lifestyle became closely associated in the public mind with the sweet fruits that grew so abundantly in the orchards around Los Angeles. Taking advantage of the rapid transportation capabilities of the transcontinental lines, Los Angeles area orchard owners began shipping their oranges to the East
1895 Oscar Wilde's final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened at the St. James' Theatre in London
1899 Congress approved, and President McKinley signed, legislation authorising states to use voting machines for federal elections
1896 Edward Prince of Wales, who would later become King Edward VII, became the first member of the British Royal Family to ride in an automobile
1912 Arizona became the 48th state of the Union
1918 The first Tarzan of the Apes movie was released
1920 The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago. Its first president was Maude Wood Park
1922 Marconi began regular broadcasting transmissions from Essex, England
1927 The Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team came into existence as Conn Smythe took over the Toronto St. Patricks and renamed them the Maple Leafs. For the next 4 years the team would play out of the old Mutual Street Arena, until Smythe's ice palace on Carlton Street, the Maple Leaf Gardens, was finished in 1931
1929 The St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place in Chicago as seven gangsters were gunned down in the first organised crime massacre of national notoriety. Gunmen in the employment of gangster Al Capone murdered seven members of the "Bugs" Moran gang to stop them hijacking whiskey shipments. Moran's gang was lured to a garage on North Clark Street with an offer of buying some high quality whiskey at a low price. After the Moran gang arrived, the assassination squad, dressed in police uniforms, entered the garage pretending to be police raiders. The seven gangsters lined up against the wall obediently and moments later were fired upon. Moran himself, who was late for the meeting, spotted the assassins entering the garage in their police uniforms, and thus was able to escape
1938 Hedda Hopper's first gossip column appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The following year, Hopper launched a radio version of her column, which ran until 1951. Hopper was the mother of actor William Hopper, who was in Perry Mason
1939 The German battleship Bismarck was launched at Hamburg, although construction and sea trials would not be complete on the 823-foot state-of-the-art battleship until May 1941. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler hoped that the ship would herald the rebirth of the German surface battle fleet, but it would be sunk by British warships in the North Atlantic off the coast of France just days after it became fully operational
1946 The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the first computer, was put into operation one day after it was first switched on at the University of Pennsylvania. The Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory commissioned the computer in 1943 to speed the calculation of firing tables for World War II artillery. Unfortunately, by the time the computer was finished, the war had been over for three months. Still, the project wasn't a total loss. The computer successfully performed complex routines in a fraction of a second and set the stage for future generations of increasingly sophisticated computers
1948 A week before the organisation was officially incorporated, NASCAR held its first race for modified stock cars on a 3.2 mile-course at Daytona Beach. In the 150-mile race that featured almost exclusively pre-war Fords, Red Byron edged Marshall Teague to become NASCAR's first champion. Stock car racing would become a tradition at Daytona, but pre-war Fords would not. By 1949 the Olds 88 had become NASCAR's dominant vehicle
1962 First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy conducted a televised tour of the White House