Born this Day

1794 Cornelius Vanderbilt - US shipping and railroad magnate who established ferry service between Manhattan & Staten Islands
1818 Amelia Bloomer - US reformer who campaigned for temperance and women's rights. In the late 1840s, she designed the knee-length skirt and trousers called 'bloomers', as part of her attempts at dress reform
1819 Julia Ward Howe - US reformer who, in 1861, wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic, sung to the tune of John Brown's Body
1837 James Butler (Wild Bill) Hickok - US Marshall, frontiersman, army scout, gambler and legendary marksman, born in Illinois. He first gained notoriety as a gunfighter in 1861 when he coolly shot three men who were trying to kill him. Six years later, a highly sensationalised account of the gunfight appeared in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, sparking his rise to national fame as a gunfighter. After accidentally killing his deputy during an 1871 shootout in Abilene, Texas, Hickok never fought another gun battle. For the next several years he lived off his famous reputation, appearing as himself in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show and working as a guide for wealthy hunters. When his renowned eyesight began to fail, he wandered the West trying to make a living as a gambler, and was arrested for vagrancy several times
1894 Dashiell Hammett – Author, and creator of Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, The Glass Key, Red Harvest, The Dain Curse) Hammett left school at age 13 and took a series of low-paying jobs, eventually landing at Pinkerton's detective agency. He worked as a detective for eight years and turned his experiences into fiction. Hammett's deadpan description of violent or emotional events came to be known as the "hard-boiled" style of detective fiction. Hammett became involved with playwright Lillian Hellman, who served as the model for Nora Charles in his 1934 comic mystery The Thin Man. Hammett and Hellman remained romantically involved until Hammett's death in 1961
1897 Sir John Douglas - British physicist who worked with Rutherford at Cambridge, where they split the atom for the first time, in 1932, and were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize
1911 Vincent Price - Actor (The House of the Seven Gables, House of Wax, The Fly, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tingler, The House of Usher, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Raven, Laura, The Three Musketeers, Twice-told Tales, Edward Scissorhands) He was born to a well-to-do candy maker and his wife in St. Louis, Missouri, and was an art and food expert. He was also the first host of PBS's Mystery!, which brought us all so many of our favourite mystery programmes, like Morse, Poirot and Sherlock. He played Egghead in TV's Batman. And, he was the voice of Professor Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective
1915 Herman Wouk - US author (The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, Marjorie Morningstar)
1918 Kam Fong – Actor (Hawaii Five-O, Goodbye Paradise, Ghost of the China Sea)
1922 Christopher Lee - British actor (The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Lord of the Rings, The Far Pavilions, The Face of Fu Manchu, Shaka Zulu, Gormenghast, Star Wars I II & III, Sleepy Hollow, Shaka Zulu, Dark Shadows, Burke and Hare) He played Sherlock Holmes in The Incident at Victoria Falls, Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, and in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. He also played Mycroft Holmes in the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and Sir Henry Baskerville in the 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles
1935 Ramsey Lewis - Musician with the group, Ramsey Lewis Trio (The In Crowd, Hang on Sloopy)
1935 Lee Meriwether - Actress (The Time Tunnel, Barnaby Jones, The Munsters Today, The New Andy Griffith Show) She was Miss America in 1955. She also appeared in the Batman TV series playing a character called Lisa Carson, in the episodes King Tut's Coup, and Batman's Waterloo. In the Batman movie, she was Catwoman, but of course her Catwoman was no match for Julie's
1936 Lou Gossett Jr - Actor (An Officer and a Gentleman, Roots, Sadat, Enemy Mine, Iron Eagle, Solar Strike, The Chiorboys)
1943 Bruce Weitz - Actor (Hill Street Blues, The Liar's Club, Deep Impact, General Hospital, Half Past Dead, Anything But Love)
1945 Bruce Cockburn - Canadian singer/songwriter (Wondering Where the Lions Are, If I Had a Rocket Launcher, Tokyo)
1955 Richard Schiff – Actor (The West Wing, Johnny English Reborn, Ray, I Am Sam, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Se7en, Solitary Man)
1961 Peri Gilpin – Actress (Frasier, Make It or Break It, Spring Forward, Uncommon Sense, Women of a Certain Age)
1965 Todd Bridges – Actor (Diff’rent Strokes, Everybody Hates Chris, Baby of the Family, Fish, Dumb Luck)
1970 Joseph Fiennes - British actor (Shakespeare in Love, Elizabeth, Enemy at the Gates, Luther, Camelot, FlashForward, The Merchant of Venice) He is the brother of Ralph Fiennes
1971 Paul Bettany – British actor (A Beautiful Mind, Margin Call, The Young Victoria, The Secret Life of Bees, The Da Vinci Code, A Knight’s Tale, Sharpe’s Waterloo)
1975 Jamie Oliver – British chef, cookbook author and TV chef (The Naked Chef, Pukka Tukka, Jamie’s Kitchen)
1980 Ben Feldman – Actor (Drop Dead Diva, Mad Men, Cloverfield, The Perfect Man)


Died this Day

1564 John Calvin, age 54 - French theologian who promoted the Protestant Reformation
1840 Nicolo Paganini - Italian virtuoso violinist and composer who is considered the greatest violinist ever, introducing new tuning and bowing techniques. He had syphilis and was prescribed mercury to swallow as a treatment. Over the years, this took away his ability to play, and changed his character. When told he had tuberculosis, and only one year to live, he increased his mercury dosage, and probably died of mercury poisoning, not TB as some have speculated
1910 Robert Koch, age 66 - German bacteriologist who discovered the bacillus of tuberculosis
1914 Sir Joseph Swan, age 85 - British physicist, chemist and inventor. Both he and Edison are separately credited with the invention of the incandescent filament electric lamp


On this Day

1679 The Habeas Corpus Act was passed in Britain. It demanded that prisoners must be brought before the courts, and not unlawfully detained
1703 Peter the Great founded the city of St. Petersburg as the new Russian capital, after winning access to the Baltic Sea through his victories in the Great Northern War
1851 The first Chess International Masters Tournament was held in London, and was won by Adolph Anderssen of Germany
1873 Prince Edward Island voted for union with Canada
1885 The last native battle in Canada was fought at Frenchman's Butte, Saskatchewan, as Big Bear and his Cree warriors escaped north after artillery attack by General Thomas Strange, who then retreated to Fort Pitt
1895 Playwright Oscar Wilde was taken to Holloway Prison in London after being convicted of sodomy. The famed writer brought attention to his private life in a feud with John Douglas, the Marquess of Queensbury, whose son was intimately involved with Wilde. Homosexuality was a criminal offence and serious societal taboo at this time in Britain, and Wilde had gone back and forth between hiding his sexual orientation and attempting to gain some measure of public acceptance. After Queensbury, a furious homophobe, began spouting his objections to Wilde's behaviour to the public, Wilde felt compelled to sue Queensbury for libel. Although advised that he was sure to lose, especially given the fact that Queensbury's charges were true, Wilde insisted on going forward with the case. The overwhelming evidence proving Wilde was homosexual produced a victory for Queensbury. This civil trial drew a great deal of public attention to Wilde's private life, and immediately after it was over, he was charged with indecency and sodomy by England's criminal courts. Rather than flee to France, Wilde decided to remain and stand trial. At Wilde's first criminal trial, he was cross-examined extensively on the "love that dare not speak its name." Wilde managed to secure a mistrial when a lone juror refused to vote to convict, leading to his second trial. Although many of the potential witnesses refused to betray Wilde by testifying, he was convicted. The judge remarked at his sentencing, "It is the worst case I have ever tried. I shall pass the severest sentence that the law allows. In my judgement it is totally inadequate for such a case as this. The sentence of the Court is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years." Wilde served his two years and then spent the last three years of his life in exile, in Paris
1896 A tornado struck St. Louis, Missouri, and East St. Louis, Illinois, killing 255 people
1927 Production of the Ford Model T officially ended after 15,007,033 units had been built. Before the Tin Lizzy's introduction, no car was reliable or affordable enough for the average man
1933 Walt Disney's Academy Award-winning animated short, The Three Little Pigs, was released
1936 The Cunard liner Queen Mary left England on its maiden voyage, from Southhampton via Cherbourg to New York
1937 The newly completed Golden Gate Bridge, spanning San Francisco Bay and connecting San Francisco and Marin County, California, was opened to the public after five years of construction. Opening day was reserved for pedestrians, and 200,000 bridge walkers marvelled at the 4,200-foot-long suspension bridge. The next day the Golden Gate Bridge opened to vehicular traffic. The concept of bridging the nearly mile-wide Golden Gate Strait was proposed as early as 1872, but it was not until the early 1920s that public opinion in San Francisco began to favour such an undertaking. After years of planning, construction began in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression. There were many difficulties to overcome: strong tides, frequent storms and fogs, and the problem of blasting rock 65 feet below the water to plant earthquake-proof foundations. Eleven men died during construction
1941 The German battleship, Bismarck, was finally sunk. Aircraft from the Ark Royal, aided in the mission by attacking and disabling its rudder. Unable to escape to the French coast, the Bismarck was engaged by the battleships King George V and HMS Rodney. The heavy cruiser, Dorsetshire, then attacked by launching torpedoes at the Bismarck, and the ship went down. The Germans claim that the Bismarck was not sunk by the British, but by her own crew, who scuttled the ship. It went down off the coast of France, with a loss of 2,300 lives
1949 The Liberals won the first general election held in Newfoundland after it became a province of Canada. Joey Smallwood, known as the last "Father of Confederation", became premier and governed there for almost 23 years, until January, 1972. Smallwood remained in the legislature until retiring in 1977
1977 Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau announced that he and his wife, Margaret, were separating and that he would have custody of their three children