Born this Day

1509 John Calvin - French theologian and church reformer who promoted the Protestant Reformation. He is the namesake of Calvin, from Calvin and Hobbes
1834 James McNeill Whistler – US painter and etcher who spent some years of his boyhood in Russia and attended the US military academy at West Point before studying painting in Europe, where he remained. His paintings of London and Venice are rich in atmosphere, and his stunning full-length portraits were highly innovative. His painting, Mother, hangs in the Louvre
1842 Adolphus Busch – German born US brewer and businessman. He founded Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest brewery
1871 Marcel Proust - French author (Remembrance of Things Past)
1914 Joe Shuster – Canadian-born cartoonist. He was born in Toronto, and moved to Cleveland, Ohio at age 9, where he would later meet Jerome Siegel, his future creative partner and co-creator of Superman
1915 Milt Buckner - Pianist, organist and composer (Hamp's Boogie Woogie, The Lamplighter, Count's Basement)
1915 Saul Bellow – Canadian author (Herzog, The Bellarosa Connecticut, Mr. Samler's Planet)
1917 Don Herbert - Science teacher (Mr. Wizard)
1917 Reg Smythe – British cartoonist who created the legendary Andy Capp comic strip of a working-class anti-hero
1920 David Brinkley - TV journalist (The Huntley-Brinkley Report)
1921 Jake LaMotta - Boxer
1922 Jean Kerr - Author (Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Finishing Touches)
1926 Fred Gwynne - Actor (The Munsters, Car 54 Where are You?, My Cousin Vinny, Fatal Attraction, Pet Sematary, The Cotton Club, On the Waterfront) and children’s book author (A Chocolate Moose for Dinner, The King Who Rained, A Little Pigeon Toad, The Sixteen Hand Horse)
1931 Alice Munro – Canadian author and short story writer (Dance of the Happy Shades, The Progress of Love, Edge of Madness)
1933 Jerry Herman – Composer and lyricist (Hello, Dolly!, La Cage aux Folles, Mame, Dear World, Mack and Mabel)
1939 Lawrence Pressman – Actor (Doogie Howser M.D., American Pie, My Giant, The Hanoi Hilton, Nine to Five, Shaft)
1941 Robert Pine – Actor (CHiPs, Independence Day, Enola Gay: The Men, The Mission, The Atomic Bomb, Empire of the Ants, Small Town Saturday Night, Lakeview Terrace)
1943 Arthur Ashe - International Tennis Hall of Famer with 33 career titles, and author (A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, Days of Grace)
1945 Ron Glass - Actor (Barney Miller, Firefly, Serenity, Deep Space, Houseguest, Death at a Funeral, Lakeview Terrace, All Grown Up) He played Eric Brenner in the Perry Mason TV movie The Case of the Shooting Star
1946 Roger Abbott – British-born Canadian actor/comedian (The Royal Canadian Air Farce, Red Green's Duct Tape Forever, The Trial of Red Riding Hood, In Good Company)
1947 Arlo Guthrie - Folk singer (The City of New Orleans, Alice's Restaurant) He’s the son of legendary folk singer, Woody Guthrie
1958 Fiona Shaw – Irish actress (Harry Potter movies, True Blood, The Black Dahlia, Empire, Gormenghast, Jane Eyre, Persuasion, Three Men and a Little Lady, Dorian Gray, My Left Foot , Killing Eve) She played Miss Morrison in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Crooked Man
1966 Gina Bellman – New Zealand actress (Leverage, Jekyll, Coupling, Sitting Ducks, King David)
1970 John Simm – British actor (Life on Mars, Doctor Who, Crime & Punishment, The Yellow House, Human Traffic, Mad Dogs, London)
1972 Sofía Vergara – Colombian actress (Modern Family, Four Brothers, Meet the Browns, The Knights of Prosperity, The Three Stooges)
1977 Chiwetel Ejiofor – British actor (Serenity, Amistad, Love Actually, Inside Man, American Gangster, 2012, Salt, The Shadow Line, Endgame, Children of Men)


Died this Day

AD138 Publius Aelius Hadrianus (Hadrian) – Roman emperor who built a wall across England’s northern border to keep out the Scots
1099 El Cid – Spanish hero who recaptured Valencia from the Moors
1851 Louis Daguerre, age 61 – French photographic pioneer and physicist who invented the daguerreotype photographic process
1941 Jelly Roll Morton, age 55 – Ragtime composer and pianist who was one of the great jazz pioneers
1979 Arthur Fiedler, age 84 - Conductor who had led the Boston Pops orchestra for a half-century
1989 Mel Blanc, age 81 - The “man of a thousand voices” who created voices for radio, television and film characters (Bugs Bunny, Barney Rubble, Dino the Dinosaur, Tweety Bird, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Road Runner, Sylvester, Quick Draw McGraw, Foghorn Leghorn, Heathcliff) Blanc began performing as a musician and singer on local radio programs in Portland before he was 20. In the late 1920s, he and his wife, Estelle, created a daily radio show for a Portland radio station, called Cobwebs and Nuts, which became a hit. In the late 1930s, Blanc and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where Blanc tried repeatedly to land a job with Warner Brother's Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. After more than a year of rejection, Blanc was finally hired. He made his Warner Bros. debut in 1937, providing the voice for a drunken bull in a short cartoon called Picador Porky. Another actor provided the pig's voice, but Blanc later replaced him. In 1940, Bugs Bunny debuted in a short called A Wild Hare. To make the wisecracking rabbit sound tough and streetwise, Blanc created a comic combination of Bronx and Brooklyn accents. In his 1988 autobiography, That's Not All Folks, Blanc described a nearly fatal traffic accident that left him in a coma. Unable to rouse him by using his real name, a doctor finally said, "How are you, Bugs Bunny?" Mel replied in Bugs' voice, "Ehh, just fine, doc. How are you?" After Mel Blanc's death, his son Noel, trained by his father, provided the voices for the characters he'd helped bring to life. He died from emphysema


On this Day

1220 A fire destroyed London bridge and killed 3,000 people
1553 Lady Jane Grey was proclaimed Queen of England but reigned only nine days
1890 Wyoming became the 44th state of the Union
1900 The Paris Metro opened
1925 In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" began with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law. The law, which had been passed in March, made it a misdemeanour punishable by fine to "teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." Scopes had conspired, with a local businessman, to get charged with this violation, and after his arrest the pair enlisted the aid of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to organise a defence. Hearing of this co-ordinated attack on Christian fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution. Soon after, the great attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU in the defence, and the stage was set for one of the most famous trials in US history to begin. Within a few days hordes of spectators and reporters had descended on Dayton. The town took on a carnival-like atmosphere. Preachers set up revival tents along the city's main street to keep the faithful stirred up, an exhibit featuring two chimpanzees and a supposed "missing link" opened in town, and vendors sold Bibles, toy monkeys, hot dogs, and lemonade. In the courtroom, Judge Raulston destroyed the defence’s strategy by ruling that expert scientific testimony on evolution was inadmissible - on the grounds that it was Scopes who was on trial, not the law he had violated. The next day, Raulston ordered the trial moved to the courthouse lawn, fearing that the weight of the crowd inside was in danger of collapsing the floor. In front of several thousand spectators in the open air, Darrow changed his tactics and as his sole witness called Bryan in an attempt to discredit his literal interpretation of the Bible. In a searching examination, Bryan was subjected to severe ridicule and forced to make ignorant and contradictory statements to the amusement of the crowd. On July 21, in his closing speech, Darrow asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty in order that the case might be appealed. Under Tennessee law, Bryan was thereby denied the opportunity to deliver the closing speech he had been preparing for weeks. After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed. Although Bryan had won the case, he had been publicly humiliated and his fundamentalist beliefs had been disgraced. Five days later, on July 26, he lay down for a Sunday afternoon nap and never woke up. In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the US Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment
1940 During World War II, the 114-day Battle of Britain began as Nazi forces began the first in a long series of bombing raids against Great Britain, attacking southern England by air. One-hundred and twenty German bombers and fighters struck a British shipping convoy in the English Channel, while 70 more bombers attacked dockyard installations in South Wales. Although Britain had far fewer fighters than the Germans (600 to 1,300) it had a few advantages, such as an effective radar system, which made the prospects of a German sneak attack unlikely. Britain also produced superior quality aircraft. Its Spitfires could turn tighter than Germany's ME109s, enabling it to better elude pursuers. Britain’s Hurricanes could carry 40mm cannon, and would shoot down, with its Browning machine guns, over 1,500 Luftwaffe aircraft. The German single-engine fighters had a limited flight radius, and its bombers lacked the bomb-load capacity necessary to unleash permanent devastation on their targets. Britain also had the advantage of unified focus, while Germany suffered from poor intelligence, and their infighting caused missteps in timing. In the opening days of battle, Britain was in immediate need of two things: a collective stiff upper lip, and aluminium. A plea was made by the government to turn in all available aluminium to the Ministry of Aircraft Production. "We will turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes," the ministry declared. And they did. By late October, Britain managed to repel the Luftwaffe, which suffered heavy losses
1946 Canada's first drive-in theatre opened in Stoney Creek, near Hamilton, Ontario
1958 The US and Canada set up a joint committee to guide North American defences in the event of an enemy attack
1958 The first parking meters in Britain were installed in Mayfair
1962 The Telstar communications satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, making possible the first live transatlantic telecasts the following day
1972 When asked how many ballistic missiles were aimed at Toronto, Ontario, Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev was reported by Time magazine to have replied, "None, I have nothing against the Indians"
1973 The Bahamas became independent after three centuries of British colonial rule
1985 Bowing to pressure from irate customers, the Coca-Cola company said it would resume selling old-formula Coke, while continuing to sell New Coke
1993 Flooding along the Mississippi and its tributaries forced more than 20,000 people from their homes. Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and parts of North Dakota and Nebraska were eventually declared disaster areas. Persistent heavy rains soaked the region, leading to the worst flooding in more than a century through the Mississippi River basin. The flooding caused 48 deaths and 10-billion dollars in damage