May 20
It’s Pick Strawberries Day and Flower Day and Be a Millionaire Day
ON THIS DAY…
1310 Shoes began to be made for both right and left feet
1570 Cartographer Abraham Ortelius issues the first modern atlas
1690 England passes the Act of Grace, forgiving followers of Catholic James II
1747 An experiment to remedy scurvy among sailors was begun by a British ship’s surgeon, James Lind, on the HMS Salisbury whereby he regulated the diets of the sailors, and especially included lemons and oranges; the positive results quickly showed that scurvy, and the huge numbers of deaths, could be easily remedied
1830 The fountain pen was patented by H.D. Hyde
1861 The state of Kentucky proclaims its neutrality, which will last until September 3 when Confederate forces enter the state
1861 North Carolina voted to secede from the Union and became the 11th and last state to do so
1862 President Abraham Lincoln signs the Homestead Act into law
1864 The Spotsylvania campaign ended after 10,920 were killed or injured
1873 Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a US patent for blue jeans with copper rivets
1875 The International Bureau of Weights and Measures was established
1883 The eruption of Krakatoa begins, leading ultimately to the volcano’s destruction three months later
1891 First public display of Thomas Alva Edison’s prototype kinetoscope
1892 George Sampson patented the clothes dryer
1913 The world’s longest submarine, the 243ft Gustave Zede, was launched at Cherbourg, France
1916 Norman Rockwells first cover on The Saturday Evening Post appeared
1920 Henry Ford publishes “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the Dearborn Independent
1921 Marie Curie was presented with a gram of radium worth $100,000 at the White House
1927 At 07:52 Charles Lindbergh takes off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, NY on the world’s first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean, touching down at Le Bourget Field in Paris at 22:22 the next day
1930 The first airplane, piloted by Charles Nicholson, was catapulted from a dirigible
1932 Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland to begin the world’s first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean by a female pilot, landing in Ireland the next day
1939 Transatlantic airmail service was inaugurated; a four-engine Pan American airplane, the Yankee Clipper, flew from Port Washington, NY via Horta to Lisbon, Portugal
1940 Inventor Igor Sikorsky demonstrated his helicopter invention to the public
1940 The first prisoners arrive at a new concentration camp at Auschwitz
1954 Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek became president of Nationalist China
1956 The first hydrogen fusion bomb (H-bomb) to be dropped from an airplane exploded over Namu Atoll at the northwest edge of the Bikini Atoll
1958 Robert Baumann obtained a patent for a satellite
1959 Japanese-Americans regained their citizenship
1969 US and South Vietnamese troops capture Hamburger Hill after one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War
1977 The stage show Beatlemania opened at the Winter Garden Theater, NY
1980 In a Referendum in Quebec, the population rejects by a 60% vote the proposal from its government to move towards independence from Canada
1982 The last episode of Barney Miller aired on ABC-TV
1990 The Hubble Space Telescope sent its first photograph from space, an image of a double star 1,260 light years away
1993 The last episode of Cheers airs on NBC-TV
1996 The Supreme Court of the United States rules in Romer v. Evans against a law that would have prevented any city, town or county in the state of Colorado from taking any legislative, executive, or judicial action to protect the rights of homosexuals
1999 In Canada the Supreme Court struck down a heterosexual definition of “spouse” as unconstitutional
2003 The final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired on UPN
2005 The Wonderful World of Disney airs “The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz” on ABC-TV
BORN:
1537 Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, surgeon, an outstanding Renaissance anatomist who helped found modern embryology
1759 William Thornton, architect, inventor, and public official, best known as the creator of the original design for the Capitol at Washington, D.C.
1768 Dolley Madison, wife of the fourth President of the United States, James Madison, and was First Lady of the United States from 1809 to 1817; she also occasionally acted as First Lady during the administration of Thomas Jefferson, fulfilling the ceremonial functions more usually associated with the President’s wife, since Jefferson was a widower
1806 John Stuart Mill, philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century
1825 George Phillips Bond, astronomer who made the first photograph of a double star, discovered a number of comets, and with his father discovered Hyperion, the eighth moon of Saturn
1851 Emil Berliner, inventor who made important contributions to telephone technology and developed the phonograph record disk, the microphone in 1877 and the gramophone in 1887
1860 Eduard Buchner, biochemist who was awarded the 1907 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for demonstrating that the fermentation of carbohydrates results from the action of different enzymes contained in yeast and not the yeast cell itself
1895 R.J. Mitchell, aircraft designer, developer of the eight-gun Spitfire, one of the best-known fighters in World War II
1908 James Stewart, Academy Award-winning actor (The Philadelphia Story, Harvey, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It’s a Wonderful Life, Anatomy of a Murder)
1911 Gardner Fox, writer best known for creating numerous comic book characters for DC Comics (such as The Flash and Hawkman) with some historians estimating that he wrote over 4,000 comics stories
1913 William Hewlett, electrical engineer who co-founded the Hewlett-Packard Company, a leading manufacturer computers, computer printers, and analytic and measuring equipment
1919 George Gobel, comedian, actor and Emmy Award-winning TV personality (Rabbit Test, The Hollywood Squares, The George Gobel Show)
1926 John Lucarotti, writer (Doctor Who, Moonbase 3, Star Maidens, Onedin Line, Lieutenant Hornblower)
1928 David Hedison, actor (Licence to Kill, The Young and the Restless, The Fly, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea)
1936 Anthony Zerbe, Emmy Award-winning actor (Harry O, The Young Riders, Star Trek: Insurrection, Licence to Kill, The Dead Zone, Centennial)
1946 Cher, singer-songwriter and actress whose career accomplishments in music, television and film include winning an Academy Award (Moonstruck), a Grammy Award, an Emmy Award and three Golden Globe Awards; she has had a US number one single in the 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s, and 1990’s
1949 Dave Thomas, actor and Emmy Award-winning writer (SCTV Network 90, Strange Brew, Boris and Natasha, Coneheads, Grace Under Fire)
1956 Dean Butler, actor (Little House on the Prairie, Jane Doe, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gidget’s Summer Reunion)
1959 Bronson Pinchot, actor (Risky Business, Beverly Hills Cop, Perfect Strangers, True Romance, Stephen King’s The Langoliers)
1960 Tony Goldwyn, actor (Ghost, Kuffs, Nixon, Kiss the Girls, The Last Samurai)
1961 Nick Heyward, singer-songwriter-musician (Haircut 100)
DIED:
1506 Christopher Columbus, “the man who discovered America,” dies at 54
1793 Charles Bonnet, naturalist and philosophical writer who discovered parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) in female aphids, dies at 73
1927 Eduard Brückner, pioneer climate researcher who also studied the glaciers of the Alps and particularly the effect of the ice ages on the Earth’s surface features, dies at 64
1947 Philipp Lenard, physicist and recipient of the 1905 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on cathode rays, dies at 84
1982 Merle Antony Tuve, research physicist and geophysicist who developed the radio-wave exploration method for the ionosphere; the observations he made provided the theoretical foundation for the development of radar, dies at 80
1984 Peter Bull, actor (Yellowbeard, Joseph Andrews, Doctor Dolittle, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, The African Queen), dies at 72
1986 Helen Brooke Taussig, physician who founded pediatric cardiology, dies at 87
1989 Gilda Radner, Emmy Award-winning actress (Saturday Night Live, Haunted Honeymoon, The Woman in Red, The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash) dies of ovarian cancer at 42
1993 Max Klein, the inventor of paint by numbers, dies at 77
1996 Jon Pertwee, actor (Doctor Who, Worzel Gummidge, The House That Dripped Blood, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Carry On…), dies at 76
2002 Steven Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science writer; dies at 60