Born this Day

1752 Joseph-Marie Jacquard - French silk weaver and loom inventor who started the textile technology revolution. His Jacquard loom utilised a punch card system to programme patterns into textiles. This method of using punched cards to program patterns was later adopted as an input method for early mechanical and electronic computers
1860 Gustav Mahler - Austrian composer and conductor (The Song of the Earth) He was the subject of the movie Death in Venice
1887 Marc Chagall - Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker and designer famous for his dreamlike pictures of Russian folklore
1899 George Cukor - Director (My Fair Lady, A Star is Born, Born Yesterday, Love Among the Ruins, The Philadelphia Story) He was fired as director of Gone With The Wind after only ten days
1911 Gretchen Franklin – British actress (EastEnders, Dead Ernest, I Didn't Know You Cared) She played Florence May Henderson in The Sweeney episode Trust Red
1915 Ruth Ford - Actress (The Woman Who Came Back, The Lady is Willing, The Eyes of the Amaryllis)
1919 Jon Pertwee – British actor (Doctor Who, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Worzel Gummidge) He also appeared in several “Carry On…” films
1922 Pierre Cardin – Venice-born French fashion designer
1924 Mary Ford - Singer with Les Paul (How High the Moon, Vaya Con Dios, The World is Waiting for the Sunrise)
1927 Charlie Louvin - Country singer (I Don't Love You Anymore, My Baby's Gone, Hoping that You're Hoping, I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby)
1927 Doc Severinsen – Trumpeter and bandleader (The Tonight Show Band, The Doc Severinsen Band) He played with the Charlie Barnet and Tommy Dorsey Orchestras
1928 Vincent Edwards - Actor (Ben Casey, The Devil's Brigade, The Dirty Dozen, The Three Faces of Eve, Motorama)
1936 Richard Wilson – Scottish actor (One Foot in the Grave, The Adventures of Merlin, Reichenbach Falls, A Passage to India, The Man Who Knew Too Little, Only When I Laugh, How To Get Ahead in Advertising) He played Duncan Ross in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Red Headed League He also played Brian Thornton in the Inspector Morse episode Absolute Conviction
1940 Ringo Starr – Drummer with The Beatles and solo singer (It Don't Come Easy, Back Off Boogaloo, Photograph, You're Sixteen) and actor (Candy, The Magic Christian, Blindman, Caveman, Give My Regards to Broad Street, Shining Time Station)
1946 Joe Spano - Actor (Hill Street Blues, Cast the First Stone, Brotherhood of Justice, American Graffiti, Northern Lights, Apollo 13, NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Hollywoodland)
1949 Shelley Duvall - Actress (The Shining, Popeye, Nashville, Roxanne, Brewster McCloud, Annie Hall, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Three Sisters)
1959 Billy Campbell – Actor (The Killing, The 4400, The O.C., Once and Again, Crime Story, Dynasty, The Rocketeer)
1963 Vonda Shepard - Singer-songwriter (Ally McBeal)
1968 Jorja Fox – Actress (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Down with the Joneses, Forever Fabulous, ER, The West Wing)
1969 Robin Weigert – Actress (Deadwood, Life, My One & Only, The Undying, Winged Creatures, Things We Lost in the Fire)
1971 Christian Camargo – Actor (Dexter, The Hurt Locker, K-19: The Widowmaker, The Picture of Dorian Gray, National Treasure: Book of Secrets)
1972 Kirsten Vangsness – Actress (Criminal Minds, In My Sleep, Pretty the Series)
1980 Michelle Kwan – US champion figure skater


Died this Day

1854 Georg Simon Ohm, age 67 – German physicist who researched electricity. The measure of electrical resistance, the ohm, was named after him
1865 Mary Surratt - The first woman in the US to be executed. She was hanged for her alleged role as a conspirator in Abraham Lincoln's assassination, although it was later revealed she knew nothing about it. Surratt owned a boarding-house in Washington DC, located a few blocks from Ford's Theatre, where Lincoln was murdered. Her boarding-house was the location where a group of Confederate supporters, including John Wilkes Booth, conspired to assassinate the president. On the day of the assassination, Booth asked Surratt to deliver a package to her old tavern in Maryland. The package was later discovered to contain firearms. On her way home, Surratt ran into John Lloyd, the former Washington chief of police who currently leased the tavern. When authorities first questioned Lloyd about their encounter, he did not mention anything significant and denied that Booth and David Herold had visited his tavern. Yet when questioned later, he claimed that Surratt had told him to have whisky and weapons ready for Booth and Herold, who would be stopping by that night. Louis Weichman, one of the alleged conspirators who delivered the package with Surratt, was released after he testified against her. He later claimed that the government had forced him to testify, and that it plagued his conscience for the rest of his life. Furthermore, Lewis Powell, a conspirator who was hanged with Surratt, proclaimed her innocence to his executioner minutes before his death. Many expected President Andrew Johnson to pardon Surratt because the US government had never hanged a woman. The execution was delayed until the afternoon, and soldiers were stationed on every block between the White House and Fort McNair, the execution site, to relay the expected pardon. But the order never came
1930 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, age 71 -Scottish-born physician and author who created Sherlock Holmes . He also wrote the Professor Challenger stories (The Lost World, The Poison Belt, The Land of the Mist), and several other novels (The Stark Munro Letters, The White Company, Micah Clarke, Sir Nigel) Conan Doyle studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh with Dr. Joseph Bell, whose extraordinary deductive powers were said to be the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. After medical school, Conan Doyle moved to London, where he practised medicine and wrote. His first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was published in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. Starting in 1891, a series of Holmes stories appeared in The Strand magazine. The popularity of the stories enabled Conan Doyle to leave his medical practice in 1891 and devote himself to writing. He grew tired of his character and had him hurled off a cliff, to his presumed death, in The Final Problem. He later resuscitated Holmes due to popular demand. In 1902, Conan Doyle was knighted for his work with a field hospital in South Africa during the Boer War. He died of a heart attack at his home, Windlesham, in Crowborough, Sussex. His grave marker carries the inscription, “Steel True, Blade Straight”
1967 Vivien Leigh, age 54 – Indian-born British actress (Gone With the Wind, A Streetcar Named Desire, Anna Karenina, Look Up and Laugh)
1970 Sir Allen Lane – British publisher and founder of Penguin, where he initiated the modern paperback
1980 Cleveland Denny - Former Canadian lightweight boxing champion who died 17 days after being knocked out by champion Gaetan Hart


On this Day

1534 In the first known exchange between Europeans and natives of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Jacques Cartier traded furs with the Micmac
1553 Disguised as a milkmaid, Queen-to-be Mary Tudor escaped from the Duke of Northumberland, who wanted to imprison her
1607 Britain's national anthem, God Save The King, was sung in public for the first time
1754 King's College in New York City opened. The school was renamed Columbia College 30 years later
1797 For the first time in US history, the House of Representatives exercised its constitutional power of impeachment and voted to charge Senator William Blount of Tennessee with "a high misdemeanour, entirely inconsistent with his public duty and trust as a Senator." Although he was a successful territorial governor, personal financial problems had led Blount to enter into a conspiracy with British officers to enlist frontiersmen and Cherokee Indians to assist the British in conquering parts of Spanish Florida and Louisiana. Before the conspiracy was uncovered, Blount presided over the Tennessee Constitutional Convention and in 1796 became the state's first US senator
1814 Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel, Waverley, was published
1846 US annexation of California was proclaimed at Monterey after the surrender of a Mexican garrison
1898 The United States annexed Hawaii
1928 The Chrysler Corporation debuted the Plymouth as its newest car, with great fanfare with renowned aviator Amelia Earhart behind the wheel. The publicity blitz brought 30,000 people to the Chicago Coliseum for a glimpse of the new car. With a delivery price of $670, the Plymouth was an attractive buy, selling over 80,000 units in its first year
1930 Construction began on Boulder Dam on the Colorado River. It is now known as Hoover Dam
1941 US forces took up positions in Iceland, Trinidad and British Guyana to forestall any German invasion, bringing the neutral US closer to war with Germany
1946 Pope Pius XXII canonised Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini, the first American to become a saint in the Catholic church
1954 Rainbow Stage, Canada’s longest running outdoor theatre, opened in Winnipeg, Manitoba
1967 The first 35 people were appointed to Companions of the Order of Canada, a decoration honouring outstanding citizens
1969 The Canadian House of Commons passed the Official Languages Act, declaring French and English to be the official languages of Canada. The Act also made the French language equal to English throughout the federal government
1981 President Reagan announced he was nominating Arizona Judge Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female justice on the US Supreme Court
1983 Eleven-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, left for a visit to the Soviet Union at the personal invitation of Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov
2005 In London, fifty-two innocent people were killed when four suicide terrorists exploded bombs in three Underground stations and a double-decker bus. It was the worst attack on London since World War II