Birthdays: French King Louis XVI, Gene Kelly, Keith Moon, Rick Springfield, Sonny Jurgensen, Alphonse Mucha, Vera Miles, River Phoenix, Queen Noor of Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Ed Benedict the designer of the Flintstones, Barbara Eden is 84, Shelley Long is 70, Nik Ranieri, Oscar Grillo
1617- The invention of the One Way Street (London).
1634- Spain’s greatest playwright Lope De Vega wrote his last poem “El Siglo de Oro” – the Golden Age. He died the next day at age 73. A duelist, and sailor on the Spanish Armada, Voltaire ranked him with Shakespeare. His work was so popular, the Holy Office of the Inquisition got angry when people sang a blasphemous doggerel that began “We believe in One Lope, the Poet Almighty…”
1750- 37 year old Swiss writer Jean Jacques Rousseau published his first mature work- Discourse on the Arts & Sciences. In it he breaks with the other French philosophers like Votlaire and Diderot and began his theory of the Noble Savage- that Civilization is the problem and we were all a lot happier when we were primitives. Voltaire laughed “the pamphlet made me want to get down on all fours and live among the bears of Canada!”
1872- The first commercial ship ever sent from Japan arrived in San Francisco carrying tea.
1926- Screen idol Rudolph Valentino died in a New York hospital of an infection due to a burst appendix and bleeding ulcer. He was only 30. Today his condition could be controlled by anti-biotics, but they weren’t invented yet. Women around the world went mad with grief. From L.A. to Budapest, women committed suicide before his picture. In Japan two women jumped into a volcano shouting his name.
1937- At the urging of the Stanford Dean of engineering Fred Terman, graduate Bill Hewlett had his first meeting with David Packard. They called their company started out of their Palo Alto garage the Engineering Service Company. The Hewlett-Packard Company would one day be one of the biggest names in computers and their garage hailed as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
1947-President Truman’s daughter Margaret gave her first public singing concert. President Truman spent the following day personally telephoning music critics and threatening any who dared to give her harsh reviews.
1953- David Mullany of Shelton Conn. invented the Whiffle Ball. He did it to help his son who was lousy at throwing a curve ball.
1964- Twist and Shout! The Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl.
1994- Jeffrey Katzenburg announced he was leaving Disney.
2007- Open source advocate Paul Messina created the hashtag for Twitter.
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