ON THIS DAY
FEAST OF ST STEPHEN, FIRST
CHRISTIAN MARTYR - Traditional starting day for British pantomimes.
1716: Thomas Gray, poet best known for his Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard, was born in London.
1791: Charles Babbage, British inventor of a calculating machine, was born. In 1823 he designed a machine which was the forerunner of the electronic computer.
1891: Novelist Henry Miller, who wrote books Tropic Of Cancer and Tropic Of Capricorn, was born in New York.
1893: Mao Tse-Tung (or Zedong), Chinese Communist leader, was born in the Hunan province.
1898: Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium.
1906: The world’s first feature film, The Story Of The Kelly Gang, was screened in Melbourne.
1908: 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.
1974: American comedian Jack Benny died.
2004: A giant 9.1-magnitude quake and tsunami killed 230,000 people in about a dozen nations
across southern Asia.
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: Dog owners were warned to keep their pets away from food compost bins due to the danger of potentially fatal toxins.
BIRTHDAYS: Jane Lapotaire, actress, 75; Dermot Murnaghan, newscaster, 62; Lars Ulrich, drummer, 56; Jared Leto, actor, 48; Jerome “Geronimo” Le Banner, kickboxer, 47; Shane Meadows, filmmaker, 47; Chris Daughtry, musician, 40; Yohan Blake, sprinter, 30.