ON THIS DAY
1716:
■ Thomas Gray, poet best known for his Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard, was born in London.
■ Charles Babbage, English inventor of a calculating machine, was born. In 1823 he designed a machine which was the forerunner of the electronic computer.
■ Novelist Henry Miller, who wrote books Tropic Of Cancer and Tropic Of Capricorn, was born in New York.
■ Mao Tse-Tung (or Zedong), Chinese Communist leader, was born in the Hunan province.
■ Marie and Pierre Curie
1791: 1891: 1893: 1898:
discovered radium.
■ The world’s first feature film, The Story Of The Kelly Gang, was screened in Melbourne.
■ Jack Johnson became the first African-American boxer to win the world heavyweight title, knocking out Tommy Burns in Round 14 in Sydney, Australia.
■ 1943: The German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk by the Royal Navy.
■ American comedian Jack Benny died.
■ A giant 9.1-magnitude quake and tsunami killed 230,000 people in about a dozen nations across southern Asia.
1906: 1908: 1974: 2004: 2006:
■ Former US president Gerald Ford, who replaced Richard Nixon in 1974, died at his home in California, aged 93.
■ ON THIS DAY LAST YEAR: A Jack Russell had to be rushed to the vets after managing to glue its teeth together by chewing on a glossy leaflet.
■ Jane Lapotaire, actress, 74; Dermot Murnaghan, newscaster, 61; Lars Ulrich, drummer, 55; Jared Leto, actor, 47; Jerome “Geronimo” Le Banner, kickboxer, 46; Shane Meadows, filmmaker, 46; Chris Daughtry, musician, 39; Yohan Blake, sprinter, 29.
BIRTHDAYS: