Born this Day

1726 James Hutton - Scottish geologist, chemist and naturalist. He wrote Theory of the Earth in 1785, which became the basis of modern geology
1808 Jefferson Davis - The first and only president of the Confederate States of America, born in Christian County, Kentucky
1853 Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie – British Egyptologist who excavated at the pyramids and temples of Gizeh
1864 Ransom Eli Olds - US inventor and automobile manufacturer who founded the Oldsmobile line. He started in his father’s machine shop, but his interest soon turned to experimenting with steam engines as a means of propelling water and road vehicles. His father disapproved of his son’s obsession with road vehicles, and was quoted saying, "Ranse thinks he can put an engine in a buggy and make the contraption carry him over the roads. If he doesn’t get killed at his fool undertaking, I will be satisfied." In 1893 he saw demonstrations of gasoline engines at the Chicago World’s Fair, and by 1895 his company had already applied for a patent on its own design of a gasoline engine
1865 George V – King of England and the Commonwealth from 1910 to 1936. He ruled during the First World War and changed the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor in 1917
1901 Maurice Evans - British-born actor (Macbeth, Planet of the Apes, The Jerk, Bewitched, A Caribbean Mystery) He also played The Puzzler in the Batman TV series
1906 Josephine Baker - US-born French dancer and singer. She was born in St. Louis, the daughter of a single mother who worked as a domestic labourer. By the time she was 8, Josephine was singing in night-clubs, and by age 16 she was touring with a dance troupe. In 1925 she travelled to Paris, where her flamboyant style infatuated the French. Baker became the most highly paid performer in Europe and began appearing in European films in the 1930s. She became a French citizen in 1937. When World War II erupted, she worked with the French Resistance, driving an ambulance and entertaining the troops. The French government later awarded her the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour. After the war, Baker purchased a large estate in southwest France and adopted 12 orphans of different nationalities. She returned to the US to take part in civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, and continued to perform occasionally until her death in 1975
1910 Paulette Goddard - Actress (So Proudly We Hail, Time of Indifference, Sins of Jezebel, Reap the Wild Wind, The Women, Modern Times)
1911 Ellen Corby – Actress (The Waltons, Vertigo, Sabrina, Shane, The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd, Support Your Local Gunfighter, The Glass Bottom Boat, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken)
1917 Leo Gorcey - Actor (Bowery Buckaroos, Here Come the Marines, 'Neath Brooklyn Bridge, Smuggler's Cove)
1924 Colleen Dewhurst – Canadian stage and screen actress (Desire Under the Elms, Long Day's Journey into Night, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Blue and the Gray, The Dead Zone, Anne of Green Gables, Murphy Brown) She was twice married to, and divorced from, actor George C. Scott, and was the mother of actor Campbell Scott
1925 Tony Curtis - Actor (Some Like It Hot, Houdini, The Boston Strangler, Spartacus, The Great Race, Taras Bulba, The Persuaders, The Mirror Crack’d) His daughter is actress Jamie Lee Curtis. He was in the Perry Mason movie, The Case of the Grimacing Governor
1926 Allen Ginsberg – US poet (Howl and Other Poems, Reality Sandwiches, Planet News, White Shroud: Poems, Howl) He was dubbed the Poet Laureate of the Beat Generation
1932 Dakota Staton - Jazz singer (No Man is Going to Change Me, The Late Late Show, Dynamic!, Crazy He Calls Me, Time to Swing)
1936 Larry McMurtry – US author (Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Streets of Laredo) His novel “Horseman, Pass By” became the basis for the movie Hud
1944 Mike Clarke – Drummer with The Byrds (Mr. Tambourine Man, Turn! Turn! Turn!)
1945 Bill Paterson – Scottish actor (Law & Order: UK, Marple: The Pale Horse, Little Dorrit, Sea of Souls, Wives and Daughters, Truly Madly Deeply, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, The Killing Fields, Smiley’s People) He played Dr. Watson in the TV movie Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars
1946 Penelope Wilton – British actress (Downton Abbey, South Riding, Calendar Girls, Iris, Victoria & Albert, Bob & Rose, Wives and Daughters, The Borrowers, Shaun of the Dead, Cry Freedom, Marple: They Do It with Mirrors, Ever Decreasing Circles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) She played Harriet Jones in Doctor Who
1950 Suzi Quatro - Singer (Stumblin' In) and actress (Happy Days)
1958 Suze Plakson – Actress (Love & War, Mad About You, How I Met Your Mother, Wag the Dog, My Stepmother is an Alien)
1952 Billy Powell – Musician on the keyboards with the group Lynryd Skynyrd (Sweet Home Alabama)
1964 James Purefoy – British actor (Rome, Vanity Fair, The Mayor of Casterbridge, A Knight's Tale, Don Quixote, Mansfield Park, The Cloning of Joanna May, The Philanthropist, Resident Evil, Injustice, The Following) He played James McCarthy in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Boscombe Valley Mystery
1967 Anderson Cooper – Journalist and TV host (Anderson Cooper 360°, Anderson, The Mole) He is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt


Died this Day

1657 William Harvey – Court physician to James I and Charles I. He published his Theory of the Circulation of Blood in 1628
1875 Georges Bizet – French composer (Carmen)
1899 Johann Strauss the Younger – Austrian composer (The Blue Danube)
1924 Franz Kafka – Czech author (The Trial) He died of tuberculosis a month before his 41st birthday
1963 Pope John XXIII, age 81 – His papacy was marked by innovative reforms in the Roman Catholic Church. He was succeeded by Pope Paul VI
1975 Ozzie Nelson, age 69 – Actor and bandleader (The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) He married, Harriet, the singer in his band, and the couple had two sons, David and Ricky
1992 Robert Morley - British actor (The African Queen, Of Human Bondage, Little Dorritt, The Alphabet Murders) He died of a stroke in Reading, Berkshire, UK, a week after his 84th birthday. He portrayed Mycroft Holmes in the Sherlock Holmes movie A Study in Terror


On this Day

1621 The Dutch West India Company received a charter for New Netherlands, now known as New York. It was founded to promote trade and colonisation in the Americas
1668 Medart Chouart des Groseilliers set sail from Gravesend, England on the ketch Nonsuch, after convincing a group of London merchants to back him on a trade voyage to Hudson Bay. The trading voyage would be a success, leading to the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1670
1800 John Adams, the second president of the US, became the first president to reside in Washington, DC, when he took up temporary residence at Union Tavern in Georgetown, as construction was completed on the executive mansion. The city of Washington was created to replace Philadelphia as the nation's capital because of its geographical position in the centre of the existing new republic. The states of Maryland and Virginia ceded land around the Potomac River to form the District of Columbia, and work began on Washington in 1791. French architect Charles L'Enfant designed the city's radical layout, full of dozens of circles, criss-cross avenues, and plentiful parks. In 1792, work began on the neo-classical White House building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue under the guidance of Irish-American architect James Hoban, whose White House design was influenced by Leinster House in Dublin and by a building sketch in James Gibbs' Book of Architecture
1837 The Hippodrome opened in London’s Bayswater to run steeplechase horse races
1888 The poem, Casey at the Bat, by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, was first published, in the San Francisco Daily Examiner
1934 Dr. Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, was knighted by King George V
1937 The Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Wallis Warfield were married in France, on what would have been his late father King George V’s 72nd birthday. The duke, formerly King Edward VIII of Great Britain, abdicated the throne in December 1936 to marry the US divorcée. Edward, born in 1896, was the eldest son of King George V and Queen Mary. Unmarried as he approached his 40th birthday, Edward socialised with the fashionable London society of the day and frequently entertained at Fort Belvedere, his country home. By 1934, he had fallen deeply in love with US socialite Wallis Warfield Simpson, who was married to Ernest Simpson, an English-American businessman living near London. Wallis, who was born in Pennsylvania in 1896 and brought up in Maryland, had previously married and divorced a US Navy pilot. The royal family disapproved of Edward's married mistress, but by 1936 the prince was intent on marrying her. Before he could discuss this intention with his father, George V died on January 20, 1936, and Edward was proclaimed King. To most British politicians and the Church of England, over which the King is the traditional head, a woman twice divorced was unacceptable as a prospective queen. Despite the seemingly united front against him, Edward could not be dissuaded. He proposed a morganatic marriage, in which Wallis would be granted no rights of rank or property, but this was rejected as impractical. With no resolution possible, the King renounced the throne on December 10. The next day, Parliament approved the abdication instrument, and Edward VIII's 325-day reign came to an end. That evening, the former King gave a radio broadcast in which he explained: "I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of King, as I would wish to do, without the help and support of the woman I love." On December 12, his younger brother, the Duke of York, was proclaimed King George VI. That day, the new king made his older brother the Duke of Windsor. On June 3, 1937, the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Warfield married at the Château de Candé in France's Loire Valley. A Church of England clergyman conducted the service, which was witnessed by only about 16 guests
1959 US President Eisenhower bounced a message off the moon to Canadian Prime Minister Diefenbaker
1965 Major Edward H. White II opened the hatch of the Gemini 4 and stepped out of the capsule 120 miles above the earth to become the first US astronaut to walk in space. Attached to the craft by a 25-foot tether and controlling his movements with a hand-held oxygen jet-propulsion gun, White remained outside the capsule for just over 20 minutes. He had been preceded as the first man ever to walk in space that March by Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei A. Leonov
1989 Chinese army troops began a sweep of Beijing to crush student-led pro-democracy demonstrations
1994 Queen Elizabeth II unveiled a Canadian war memorial in London's Green Park, across from Buckingham Palace. It honoured Canadians who fought and died in two world wars