1449 – Anti-pope Felix V resigns
1507 – Geographer Martin Waldseemuller first used name America
1684 – Patent granted for thimble
1792 – Guillotine first used in France, executes highwayman Nicolas J Pelletier
1850 – Paul Julius Reuter, use 40 pigeons to carry stock market prices
1859 – Ground broken for Suez Canal
1861 – American Civil War: The Union Army arrives to reinforce Washington, D.C.
1875 – Latest date for measurable snow (3 inches of the white stuff) in New York City
1886 – Sigmund Freud opens practice at Rathausstrasse 7, Vienna 1901 – New York becomes first state requiring auto license plates ($1 fee)
1926 – Giacomo Puccini’s opera “Turandot” premieres in Milan
1942 – Luftwaffe bombs the city of Bath in the UK
1953 – Scientists identify DNA
1954 – Bell labs in New York City announces first solar battery
1960 – First submerged circumnavigation of Earth completed (Triton)
1961 – Robert Noyce patents integrated circuit
1967 – Jules Feiffer’s “Little Murders” premieres in NYC
1980 – A’s manager Billy Martin restrained by umpires from attacking a fan
1990 – Hubble space telescope is placed into orbit by shuttle Discovery
2005 – The final piece of the Obelisk of Axum is returned to Ethiopia after being stolen by the invading Italian army in 1937.
Birthdays
1599 – Oliver Cromwell, Puritan lord protector of England (1653-58)
1710 – James Ferguson, astronomer
1868 – John Bevins Moisant, pioneer aviator, first to cross English Channel with passenger and a cat, killed in New Orleans whose present day airport was originally name for him. (D. 1910)
1874 – Guglielmo Marconi, Bologna Italy, inventor (radio, Nobel 1909)
1908 – Edward R Murrow, Pole Creek NC, newscaster (Person to Person)
1912 – Gladys L Presley, mother of Elvis On January 8, 1935, Gladys Love Presley gave birth to a set of twins. The first of the two was born at 4AM and was stillborn. He was given the name Jesse Garon Presley and was buried in a cardboard box in an unmarked grave -the family was too poor to afford a coffin. The second twin arrived at 4:35 AM and was named Elvis Aron Presley.
1917 – Ella Fitzgerald, Newport News VA, jazz singer
1923 – Albert King, Indianola, Mississippi, American blues singer/guitarist
1930 – Paul Mazursky, Brooklyn, writer/director (Moscow on the Hudson)
1932 – Meadowlark Lemmon, basketball star (Harlem Globetrotter) [or 0421]
1940 – Al Pacino, NYC, actor
Deaths
1744 – Anders Celsius, Swedish astronomer dies at 42
Anders Celsius was a Swedish mathematician and astronomer. He was the grandson and son of astronomers and lived in a time when scientists were attempting to confirm the shape of the earth among other mysteries of
life. The earth was an ellipsoid flattened at the poles as Newton had predicted.
He was the first to use plates of colored glass to measure and record the brightness of stars. His lasting achievement was proposing an international temperature scale with 100 degrees for the freezing point of water and 0 for its boiling point. However one year after his death in 1745, Carl Linnaeus reversed the scale for more practical measurement and it is of course still in use today.(wikipedia)
1990 – Dexter Gordon, Jazz saxophonist, dies of kidney failure at 67
1995 – Ginger Rogers, actress/dancer (Top Hat, Stage Door), dies at 83
2006 – Jane Jacobs, American-born Canadian urbanist (b. 1916)
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