Birthdays: King George IV, Cecil B. DeMille, The alien Alf- 1757, Cantinflas, Buck Owens, Edith Hamilton, Diamond Jim Brady, screenwriter William Goldman, Mtsislav Rostropovitch, Xenia Sharpe (educator who invented the children’s reader Dick & Jane) Kathy Lee Bates-the author of the song America the Beautiful, Klara Schickelgruber- Hitlers mom, Dominique Swain, Pete Samprass, Sam Fuller, John Casale-I'm not Fredo! , George Hamilton is 81, Casey Affleck is 45.
1877-THE BIRTH OF RECORDED SOUND. Thomas Edison announced his sound recording invention and demonstrates it by recording "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a tin cylinder. Edison never quite understood the possibilities of a music industry and was convinced that the recorded sound was going to be a used primarily for people to listen to the voices of deceased family, sort of like a voice from the grave. That idea was so popular that it translated to the Logo of the RCA Company with the familiar image of the dog listening to "His master's voice". The original image of that dog listening to his master's voice, had the dog sitting on a coffin.
A few years later Emile Berliner from Georgia invented the flat record disc. Edison thought the disc was clumsy and too fragile. In the future he declared, everyone would use recording cylinders.
1915 - "Of Human Bondage," by William Somerset Maugham, published.
1927- the William Wellman movie WINGS opened with Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the first silent film to win best picture at the Academy Awards before the advent of sound. Director Wild Bill Wellman was himself a former fighter pilot and flew many of the stunt shots. He bolted cameras to the nose of planes and had the actors film themselves while flying.
The second silent film to ever win best picture was The Artist, in the year 2012.
1932 Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first published. Before anyone ever heard of stem cells, Huxley had written a scholarly paper on the moral dangers inherent in controlled eugenics. Writer H.L. Mencken urged Huxley to put his ideas in a fiction form to reach a wider audience. The title comes from Shakespeare's the Tempest " Oh Brave New World, that hath such people in it!'
1951- Bob McKimson’s Warner Bros short Hillbilly Hare. The short includes the long routine animated by Emery Hawkins when Bugs Bunny takes over calling a square dance and uses it to torture the two twin-brother hillbillies who are after him.
1968- The album Cheap Thrills released, from Big Brother and the Holding Company and their lead singer Janis Joplin. R. Crumb drew the famous cover.
1981- IBM introduced its first PC- personal computer and PC-DOS I. Unlike Apple, IBM shared the basic hardware design, so a myriad of cheaper competitor PC’s soon flooded the market.
1983- The Canadian animated feature Rock & Rule opened in theaters.
1988- Martin Scorcese’ film The Last Temptation of Christ opened in theaters to howls of protests from religious groups. There had been more inflammatory interpretations of the Christ story on screens in the past like Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew and the Canadian film Hail Mary, but the church groups weren’t that media savvy yet. Like all these protest efforts, all the controversy really did was boost its box office.
2008- Entertainer and producer Merv Griffin died at age 81. The creator of games shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, his last statement on his website was " I was planning to go on vacation, but this is not the destination I intended."
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