August 3

It’s Friendship Day and International Forgiveness Day and National Watermelon Day and Sisters Day

ON THIS DAY…
1492 Three ships commanded by Christopher Columbus depart from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on the voyage that leads to the European discovery of the New World
1596 David Fabricius discovered the light variation of Mira (first variable star)
1678 Robert LaSalle builds the Le Griffon, the first known ship built in America
1769 The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California were first noticed by a Spanish expedition. Juan Crespi, a Franciscan friar with the expedition of Gaspar de Portola (the first Spanish governor of the Californias), in 1769-70, wrote “The 3rd, we proceeded for three hours on a good road; to the right were extensive swamps of bitumen which is called chapapote. We debated whether this substance, which flows melted from underneath the earth, could occasion so many earthquakes”
1829 William Tell, the final opera of composer Gioacchino Rossini, has its premiere in Paris, France
1852 First Boat Race between Yale and Harvard, the first American intercollegiate athletic event; Harvard won
1900 Firestone Tire & Rubber Company founded
1907 John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company is indicted for receiving rebates from railroads as a means of stifling competition
1908 The Philadelphia Subway opened, also known as Tube Transportation
1908 A nearly complete, buried, skeleton of a Neanderthal was discovered in a cave at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France, by two young clergymen, brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie
1921 The first crop dusting from an airplane was demonstrated by pilot Lt. John A. Macready who spread lead arsenate insecticide dust over a six acre catalpa grove on the farm of Harry A. Carver near Troy, OH to kill a serious infestation of Sphinx moth caterpillars
1923 The deceased Warren G. Harding was succeeded by Vice President Calvin Coolidge as the 30th President of the United States
1926 The first traffic lights in Britain were installed at Piccadilly Circus
1933 The Mickey Mouse Watch is introduced at a cost of $2.75
1934 Adolf Hitler becomes the supreme leader of Germany by joining the offices of President and Chancellor into Führer
1936 American sprinter Jesse Owens wins the first of his four gold medals in the Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany, tying the Olympic record of 10.3 sec in the 100-meter dash
1948 Writer Whittaker Chambers testifies before Congress that Alger Hiss, a former high government official, was a Communist and a Soviet spy; Hiss is later convicted of perjury but maintains his innocence
1949 National Basketball Association is founded in the United States
1955 The 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea Exhibit opens at Disneyland; the walk-through exhibit, located in Tomorrowland, features props and set pieces from the 1954 Disney release 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and will remain open until August 1966
1958 The USS Nautilus became the first submarine to travel under the geographic North Pole when the ice-pack conditions were favorable; this was the first atomic-powered submarine in the US Navy
1958 The Billboard Hot 100 is founded
1981 Air traffic controllers in the United States go on an illegal strike; when the strike continues, President Ronald Reagan fires a majority of the nation’s air traffic controllers later in the year
2003 Police in London, England, used the Taser electric stun gun on a suspect for the first time in that country
2004 The pedestal of the Statue of Liberty reopens after being closed since the September 11, 2001 attacks

BORN:
1900 Ernie Pyle, journalist who wrote as a roving correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain from 1935 until his death in combat during World War II
1904 Clifford D. Simak, science fiction writer who won three Hugo awards (The Big Front Yard, Way Station, Grotto of the Dancing Deer) and one Nebula award (Grotto of the Dancing Deer), as well as being named the third Grand Master by the SFWA in 1977
1920 P. D. James (Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL), author of crime fiction and a life peer in the British House of Lords
1923 Jean Hagen, actress (The Shaggy Dog, Singing in the Rain, Adam’s Rib, Panic in Year Zero!)
1927 Gordon Scott (Gordon Merrill Werschkul), actor and body-builder whose greatest claim to fame was his role as the movies’ eleventh (and some say best) Tarzan
1940 Martin Sheen, Emmy Award-winning actor (Murphy Brown, The West Wing, The Execution of Private Slovik, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, Apocalypse Now)
1950 John Landis, actor, director, writer, producer (The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Kentucky Fried Movie)
1979 Evangeline Lilly, actress (Lost, Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital)

DIED:
1966 Lenny Bruce (Leonard Alfred Schneider), stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s whose 1964 conviction in an obscenity trial led to the first posthumous pardon in New York history, dies of a drug overdose at 40
1983 Carolyn Jones, actress (The Seven Year Itch, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Bachelor Party, King Creole, The Addams Family), dies of colon cancer at 53
1995 Ida Lupino, actress, writer, director (Anything Goes (1936), High Sierra, The Sea Wolf, The Hard Way), dies at 81
2007 John Gardner, spy novelist who, between 1981 and 1996, Gardner wrote fourteen James Bond novels, and the novelizations of two Bond films, dies at 80