View todays celebrity birthdays and find out what happened in history today.
What : day is it
1847 – Bram Stoker, Irish author remembered for the classic, ‘Dracula’, was born. Whitby has associations with the Dracula novel.
1866 – Herbert Austin, later Baron Austin, English motor car manufacturer, was born.
1920 – Rupert Bear made his first appearance in the Daily Express. Rupert Bear Annuals have been produced since 1936 and are still in production today. The Rupert Annual is still one of the top three Annual titles sold worldwide.
1957 – A report into a fire at Windscale nuclear power plant in Cumbria blamed the accident on human error, poor management and faulty instruments. The fire caused an unspecified amount of radioactive iodine vapour – iodine 131 – to escape into the atmosphere.
1957 – Britain conducted its first successful hydrogen bomb test, over Kiritimati in the Pacific.
1958 – Melody Maker published the first British album charts.
1965 – The bill abolishing the death penalty became law.
1967 – BBC Radio Leicester (the first of the new breed of BBC Local Radio stations) began broadcasting at 12.45 p.m. from a transmitter located on Gorse Hill above the city centre.
1974 – Covent Garden ceased to be the location of London’s famous flower and vegetable market as it moved across the Thames, leaving the old warehouses and Floral Hall.
1987 – An IRA bomb exploded shortly before a Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, killing 11 people.
1990 – The Republic of Ireland elected its first woman president, Mary Robinson. The mother-of-three had been a member of the Irish Senate for more – than 20 years.
1992 – Williams driver Nigel Mansell crashes during the season ending Australian Grand Prix in Adelaide, but still seals the Formula 1 World Drivers Championship.
2003 – The Countess of Wessex (wife of Prince Edward) gave birth to her first child – Lady Louise Windsor, a month early at Frimley Park hospital in Surrey. The baby weighed just 4lbs 9oz (2 kg).
2005 – Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is elected president of Liberia, the first woman to lead an African country.
2011 – Asteroid 2005 YU55 came dangerously close to hitting the Earth. It whizzed past at a distance of about 201,700 miles (324,600 km), closer than the moon’s orbit. It was the closest a space object has come to us since 1976.
2016 – Donald Trump is elected president of the US.
2017 – Cabinet minister Priti Patel resigns after secret meetings are revealed with Israeli officials.
2018 – A Camp Fire in California became that state’s deadliest blaze after it killed 88 people and caused 52,000 people to be evacuated.
Did you know that on this day in 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered x-rays? He used the “X” because it’s the mathematical symbol for the unknown, and he wasn’t sure what he’d discovered at first.
A lobsters blood is colorless but when exposed to oxygen it turns blue.
Cash is a gift certificate to everywhere.
Sailors considered black cats good luck and would use them as “ship’s cats” in hopes of a safe voyage. Wives of fishermen would also keep a black cat at home as it was believed that the cat would allow their husbands to return safely.
Redbad, the last pagan King of Frisia (northern Netherlands), refused to convert to Christianity because he “preferred spending eternity in Hell with his pagan ancestors than in Heaven with his enemies.”
The Capital of Fiji is Suva
“May the Force be with you.” – Han Solo (Harrison Ford) in Star Wars, 1977
Felix Mendelssohn – Real Name: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Greece’s most famous ruin, the Parthenon, survived from Ancient times until the near-modern age completely intact. It was blown to pieces in 1687 after the Ottoman Turks used the Temple to store explosives
“ET phone home.” – Gertie (Drew Barrymore) #moviequotes
Colonel Thomas Blood, known as the ‘Man who stole the Crown Jewels’. He was caught, however, King Charles II was so impressed that he was pardoned and rewarded with a large annuity.
A group of Bass is called a Shoal.
Birthday : quotes
“Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” – John F. Kennedy (elected November 8, 1960)
“Nothing is too small. I counsel you, put down in record even your doubts and surmises. Hereafter it may be of interest to you to see how true you guess. We learn from failure, not from success!” – Bram Stoker
“Chefs are nutters. They’re all self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little souls, and absolute psychopaths. Every last one of them.” – Gordon Ramsay
“We can live in fear or act out of hope.” – Bonnie Raitt
“Every problem has two handles. You can grab it by the handle of fear or the handle of hope.” – Margaret Mitchell
“I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to make it look like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn’t. It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat, glistening grubs writhing blindly, squirming over each other, frantically tunnelling away from the light. But even that isn’t the real horror. The horror is this: in the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.” – Alan Moore
2018 – Xi’an, China, introduced a pedestrian lane for people who walk while looking at their phones.
1993 – The Holbeck Hall Hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, fell into the sea following a landslide, making news around the world.
1805 – The first Trooping of the Colour took place on Horse Guards Parade. It was Edward VII who moved Trooping the Colour to its June date, because of the vagaries of British weather.