Born this Day

1803 Justice, Baron von Liebig - German chemist who discovered chloroform
1812 Edward Lear - British landscape painter and poet (Book of Nonsense, The Owl and the Pussycat)
1820 Florence Nightingale - British hospital reformer and the founder of modern nursing, who was known as The Lady of the Lamp. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she assembled a hospital unit of 38 nurses and despite opposition, established and operated hospitals. She had over 10,000 under her care in appalling and unsanitary conditions. Determined to remedy the suffering she had experienced, she raised £50,000 to establish nurses' training in Britain
1828 Dante Gabriel Rossetti - British Pre-Raphaelite painter, and poet (The Blessed Damozel, Sister Helen, The House of Life) He was the brother of poet, Christina Rossetti. 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. He studied art and became a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an art group embracing art for art's sake. In 1860, Rossetti married a beautiful model named Elizabeth Siddal. Two years later, she died from an accidental overdose of laudanum. Rossetti, devastated, buried the only complete manuscript of his poetry with her. The manuscript was later unearthed and published during his lifetime
1873 J.E.H. MacDonald - Canadian artist, who was a founding member of the Group of Seven, a small but influential art community in Canada
1874 Baron Clemens von Pirquet - Austrian physician who devised a skin test for tuberculosis
1880 Lincoln Ellsworth - US explorer, civil engineer and scientist who was the first man to fly over both the North and the South Poles
1895 William Giauque – Canadian chemist who, while at the University of California, discovered a way of producing temperatures near absolute zero. He won the Nobel Prize in 1949
1903 Wilfred Hyde-White - British actor (Two Way Stretch, The Browning Version, Carry on Nurse, Ten Little Indians, The Associates, Xanadu) He was also in My Fair Lady with Jeremy Brett
1907 Leslie Charteris - Singapore born British novelist (The Saint series of books)
1907 Katharine Hepburn - Actress (Morning Glory, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, On Golden Pond, Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike, The African Queen, The Rainmaker, Rooster Cogburn, Suddenly Last Summer, Mary of Scotland, Love Affair)
1921 Farley Mowat - Canadian author (People of the Deer, Canada North, Never Cry Wolf, The Boat Who Wouldn't Float, And No Birds Sang)
1921 Joe Maphis - Country singer, with his wife Rose Lee, and entertainer (Hometown Jamboree, Town Hall Party, Hee Haw) and songwriter (Dim Lights Thick Smoke and Loud Loud Music)
1925 Yogi Berra - Baseball Hall of Famer, catcher/manager of the NY Yankees, former manager of NY Mets
1928 Burt Bacharach - Composer (Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, Promises Promises, What the World Needs Now, Walk on By, Close to You, What's New Pussycat?, I Say a Little Prayer, Do You Know the Way to San Jose, Arthur's Theme, That's What Friends are For)
1936 Tom Snyder - Broadcast journalist and TV host (The Late Show with Tom Snyder, Tomorrow, Contact, The Tom Snyder Radio Show)
1937 George Carlin - Comedian and actor (The George Carlin Show, Award Theatre, 1st host of Saturday Night Live, The Kraft Summer Music Hall, Wonderful W-I-N-O, Seven Dirty Words, Prince of Tides, That Girl, Car Wash, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure)
1937 Susan Hampshire - British actress (Monarch of the Glen, The Forsyte Saga, David Copperfield, The Barchester Chronicles, Cry Terror)
1938 Millie Perkins - Actress (The Diary of Anne Frank, Wall Street, Ensign Pulver)
1942 Pam St. Clement – British actress (EastEnders, Biggles, Private Schulz, Emmerdale Farm, A Horseman Riding By)
1943 Linda Dano – Actress (General Hospital, One Life to Live, Another World) She also played Sandra Drake in the Perry Mason movie, The Case of the Killer Kiss
1948 Steve Winwood - Singer (Gimme Some Lovin', Don't You Know What the Night Can Do, Higher Love, The Finer Things, Roll With It)
1950 Gabriel Byrne - Irish actor (Excalibur, Siesta, Hello Again, Point of No Return, The Usual Suspects, Cool World)
1950 Bruce Boxleitner - Actor (Scarecrow and Mrs. King, The Babe, Babylon 5, Tron, Chuck)
1958 Kim Greist - Actress (Throw Momma From the Train, Brazil)
1959 Ving Rhames - Actor (Con Air, Striptease, Mission: Impossible, Pulp Fiction, Dave, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot)
1962 Emilio Estevez - Actor (Maximum Overdrive, Breakfast Club, Repo Man, Young Guns, Stakeout, The Mighty Ducks, Men at Work, Freejack) He is Martin Sheen's son and Charlie Sheen's brother
1966 Stephen Baldwin - Actor (Born on the Fourth of July, The Usual Suspects, The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas) He is the brother of Alec, William and Daniel Baldwin
1968 Catherine Tate – British comedienne and actress (Doctor Who, The Office, The Catharine Tate Show, Gulliver’s Travels, Marple: A Murder is Announced)
1969 Kim Fields – Actress (The Facts of Life, The Residents of Washinton Heights, Me and Mrs Jones)
1977 Rachel Wilson – Canadian actress (Republic of Doyle, Total Drama Island, The Kennedys, Puck Hogs, Breaker High
1986 Emily VanCamp – Canadian actress (Revenge, Brothers & Sisters, Black Irish, Everwood, The Ring Two, Captain America: Civil War, The Resident)
1992 Malcolm David Kelley – Actor (Lost, Knights of the South Bronx, Gigantic, Antwone Fisher)


Died this Day

1860 Sir Charles Barry - British architect who won the competition to rebuild the British Houses of Parliament after they were burnt down in 1834
1884 Bedrich Smetana - Czechoslovakian composer (The Bartered Bride)
1992 Robert Reed, age 59 - Actor (The Brady Bunch, The Defenders, Mannix, Nurse, Rich Man Poor Man-Book I, Roots, The Runaways)
2001 Perry Como - Singer (Ko Ko Mo I Love You So, Hot Diggity, Catch a Falling Star, It's Impossible, Temptation, Dream along with Me, And I Love You So) and TV host (The Perry Como Show) He died a week before his 89th birthday


On this Day

1797 Napoleon captured Venice, which had been independent for 14 centuries
1829 Friends of mathematician Charles Babbage rallied together to find a way to help him. Together they approached the Duke of Wellington, to request funding. Babbage devoted more than ten years and most of his personal fortune to building an automatic calculating machine he called the Difference Engine. Although the project gained government support and much publicity, the machine proved extremely costly to build. The Duke of Wellington agreed to give Babbage more funding and lobbied the government for additional support. Unfortunately, after spending £17,000 of government funds and nearly the same amount from his own pocket, Babbage ran out of money and was never able to build the machine. In 1854, a Swedish engineer finally succeeded in constructing a Difference Engine based on Babbage's theories
1870 Manitoba entered Confederation as the fifth Canadian province. The former Red River Colony was purchased from the Hudson Bay Company by Canada. The passing of the Manitoba Act incorporated most of the Métis demands. On the 96th anniversary of this event, in 1966, the flag of Manitoba was proclaimed. The name Manitoba means 'The Great Spirit Speaks'
1870 The London Swimming Association drafted the rules of water polo
1926 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, Italian adventurer Umberto Nobile, and US explorer and civil engineer Lincoln Ellsworth crossed the North Pole in the Italian airship Norge, later landing in Alaska. It was Ellsworth’s 46th birthday. Three days earlier Richard E. Byrd had claimed to have flown over the pole in his airplane, but that claim was thrown into doubt with the discovery of Byrd’s diary in 1996
1932 The twenty-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh, the US aviator who made the first solo, non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927, was found dead in the woods near the Lindbergh home. On March 1, the infant was kidnapped from the nursery of his parents' home in Hopewell, New Jersey
1935 Alcoholics Anonymous was founded by 'Bill W', William Wilson, in Akron, Ohio
1937 At London's Westminster Abbey, George VI and his consort, Lady Elizabeth, were crowned King and Queen of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth during a coronation ceremony dating back over a millennium. The coronation was heard throughout the Empire on the first world-wide radio broadcast. George, who studied at Dartmouth Naval College and served during World War I, ascended to the throne after his elder brother, King Edward VIII, abdicated on December 11, 1936. Edward, the first English monarch to voluntarily relinquish the throne, agreed to give up his title in the face of widespread criticism of his desire to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, a US divorcee
1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, and Olivia De Havilland, premiered at New York's Radio City Music Hall. The movie cost $2 million, an extraordinarily large budget at the time
1950 10,000 people were evacuated from Manitoba's Red River valley south of Winnipeg. An approaching flood caused 25-million dollars damage before the crisis ended May 25th
1969 Chevrolet announced that it would discontinue production of the Corvair. The Corvair, which had come under heavy attack in Ralph Nader's book, Unsafe At Any Speed, never achieved great success, thanks mostly to its reputation for poor safety. Nader called the Corvair "one of the nastiest-handling cars ever built." The Corvair was accused of flipping over in moderately severe accident conditions. In the end, over five hundred individual court cases dealing with the Corvair were filed against General Motors. GM never lost one of these cases, although it did settle out of court in a number of them
1978 The US Commerce Department said hurricanes would no longer be given only female names