May 15
It’s National Chocolate Chip Day and Police Officer’s Memorial Day and Straw Hat Day
ON THIS DAY…
1252 Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull ad extirpanda, which authorizes the torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition; torture quickly gains widespread usage across Catholic Europe
1501 Ottaviano Petrucci of Venice founded the first modern-style music publishing house, by producing the first book of music made from movable type
1567 Mary, Queen of Scots, marries her third husband James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, who was acquitted of complicity in her former husband’s murder
1618 Johannes Kepler confirms his previously rejected discovery of the third law of planetary motion (he first discovered it on March 8 but soon rejected the idea after some initial calculations were made)
1718 James Puckle, a London lawyer, patents the worlds first machine gun
1756 The Seven Years’ War begins when England declares war on France
1817 Opening of the first private mental health hospital in the United States, the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason (now Friends Hospital) Philadelphia, PA
1862 The US Department of Agriculture was created by an act of Congress
1869 In New York, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton form the National Woman Suffrage Association
1882 Czar Alexander III banned Jews from living in rural Romania
1905 Las Vegas, NV is founded
1911 The United States Supreme Court declares Standard Oil to be an “unreasonable” monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act and orders the company to be dissolved
1915 AT&T became the 1st corporation to have 1 million stockholders
1918 The first air mail route in the US was established between New York and Washington, DC, with a stop at Philadelphia
1923 Listerine was registered as a trademark
1930 Ellen Church, the first airline stewardess, went on duty aboard an Oakland-to-Chicago flight operated by Boeing Air Transport
1934 The US Dept. of Justice offered $25,000 reward for John Dillinger, dead or alive
1935 The Moscow Metro was opened to public
1935 At the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, Albert Einstein was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal for his outstanding fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, especially his relativity theory
1940 Nylon stockings went on general sale for the first time in the US; four million pairs were sold in several hours
1941 Baseball player Joe DiMaggio begins a 56-game hitting streak
1941 Britain’s first jet-propelled aircraft, the Gloster-Whittle E.28/39, flew for the first time, taking off from RAF Cranwell on a historic 17 minute flight
1942 In the United States, a bill creating the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) is signed into law
1953 Stanley L. Miller’s paper on the synthesis of amino acids under conditions that simulated primitive Earth’s atmosphere was published in Science
1957 Great Britain drops a hydrogen bomb on Christmas Island in the Pacific, becoming the third nation, after the United States and the Soviet Union, with thermonuclear capabilities
1958 The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 3
1960 The Soviet Union launches Sputnik 4
1963 Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper blasted off aboard Faith 7 on the final mission of the Project Mercury space program
1963 Spoofing President John F. Kennedy’s domestic life, “The First Family” comedy album, by Vaughn Meader was named Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards
1964 The Smothers Brothers give their first concert in Carnegie Hall in New York City
1970 President Richard Nixon appoints Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington the first female US Army Generals
1972 Alabamas Governor George Wallace was shot by Arthur Bremer while campaigning in Laurel, MD, for the Democratic presidential primary; Wallace was left paralyzed
1988 The Soviet Union begins withdrawing its forces from Afghanistan nearly a decade after invading the country
1991 Edith Cresson becomes France’s first female prime minister
1993 A woman in Paris was surgically given two new lungs, both of which were cut from the single lung of a large man
BORN:
1788 Neil Arnott, physician and scientist who invented a water-bed for the comfort of patients during a prolonged illness
1803 Sir Arthur Thomas Cotton, engineer whose life-work was constructing irrigation, navigation canals and dams for water storage in Southern India, saving thousands from famine and promoting local economy
1856 Lyman Frank Baum, author, actor, and independent filmmaker who is best known as the creator of one of the most popular books in American children’s literature, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
1859 Pierre Curie, physical chemist and co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903
1863 Frank Hornby, inventor and toy manufacturer who patented the Meccano construction set
1899 William Hume-Rothery, metallurgist, internationally known for his work on the formation of alloys and intermetallic compounds
1905 Joseph Cotton, actor (Citizen Kane, Shadow of a Doubt, Soylent Green, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte)
1909 James Mason, actor (Charade, A Star Is Born, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lolita, Georgy Girl, The Boys from Brazil)
1912 André De Toth, writer-director (House of Wax, The Bounty Hunter, The Two-Headed Spy)
1918 Joseph Wiseman, actor (Dr. No, Viva Zapata!, Bye Bye Braverman, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz)
1918 Eddy Arnold, country music singer, who 145 songs on the country charts – including 28 number one hits ranks among the most popular country singers in US history
1926 Anthony Shaffer, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter; his play Sleuth which garnered him Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America for both the film and theater versions: for Best Play in 1971, and Best Screenplay in 1973; is other major screenplays include Frenzy and The Wicker Man
1926 Peter Shaffer, dramatist who won the 1975 Tony Award for Best Play for Equus and Tony Award for Best Play in 1981 for Amadeus, which won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture when it was made into a movie in 1984
1936 Ralph Steadman, renowned for his political and social caricatures and cartoons and also for illustrating a number of picture books; he had a long partnership with the journalist Hunter S. Thompson
1936 Paul Zindel, author, playwright and educator; he won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with his play The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
1937 Madeline Albright, the first woman to become United States Secretary of State (1997-2001)
1948 Brian Eno (Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno), music theorist and record producer; Eno’s production and songwriting credits include critical and commercial successes by Talking Heads and U2, such as “Remain in Light” and “The Joshua Tree”
1951 Chazz Palminteri, actor-writer-director (A Bronx Tale, The Usual Suspects, Mulholland Falls, Hoodwinked!, Kojak, Little Man)
1960 Rob Bowman, director-producer (The X-Files, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose, Reign of Fire)
1966 Greg Wise, actor (Sense and Sensibility, The Moonstone, A Cock and Bull Story, Marple: Towards Zero)
1969 Emmitt Smith, retired football player (1990-2004), who played for the Dallas Cowboys and Arizona Cardinals; he is a three time Super Bowl champion, MVP of Super Bowl XXVIII, the NFL’s all time rushing leader and Dancing with the Stars season 3 champion
DIED:
1833 Edmund Kean, actor, regarded in his time as the greatest ever; Kean was the first to restore the tragic ending to Shakespeare’s King Lear, which had been replaced on stage since 1681 by Nahum Tate’s, happy ending adaptation The History of King Lear, dies at 44
1886 Emily Dickinson, prolific private poet, choosing to publish fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems; her poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often utilize slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation, dies at 55
1904 Étienne-Jules Marey, physiologist and chronophotographer, who while studying how blood moves in the body invented the sphygmograph, which made a graphical record of the pulse and variations in blood pressure, dies at 74
1972 Nigel Green, actor (Countess Dracula, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Queen’s Traitor, Khartoum), dies of accidental barbiturate overdose at 47
1991 Ronald Lacey, actor (The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Firefox, Yellowbeard, The Fearless Vampire Killers), dies at 55
1992 Robert Morris Page, physicist who invented the technology for pulse radar while employed at the US Naval Research Laboratory, dies at 88
1996 Homer Groening, father of Matt, Lisa, Patty and Maggie, dies at 76
2003 June Carter Cash, singer, songwriter, actress, comedian and author who was a member of the Carter Family and the second wife of singer Johnny Cash; she played the guitar, banjo, harmonica, and autoharp, dies at 73
2004 Col. Robert Morgan, commander of the B-17 Flying Fortress Memphis Belle during World War II who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak leaf clusters, and the Air Medal with ten oak leaf clusters, dies at 85