Birthdays: Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV-1642, Frederic Opper the cartoonist of Happy Hooligan, Phillip Freneau, Roger Miller, Issac Asimov, Julius LaRosa, Tito Schipa, Renata Tebaldi, Tex Ritter, Dick Huemer, Cuba Gooding Jr, is 53, Tia Carrere, Kate Bosworth is 38
1496- Did Leonardo da Vinci try to fly? Leonardo studied the motor actions of birds and sketched numerous flying machines. In one of his notebooks Leonardo had written:” On the second day of January, I will make the attempt.” Leonardo later noted in his financial records payment to a physician when his apprentice named Antonio broke his leg. It’s been speculated Antonio broke it trying to pilot one of his master’s flying machines.
1843- Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman premiered in Dresden.
1897- Young writer Stephen Crane survived a shipwreck when the good ship SS Commodore went down off the coast of Florida. He went on to write The Open Boat and The Red Badge of Courage.
1937- Hollywood actor Ross Alexander had hit on tough times. He had been in a few movies like Captain Blood and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but his career seemed to be stalled, he was in debt, and his wife committed suicide. This day the 29 year old went into the barn behind his Encino home and shot himself. The Warner Bros. Studio looked around for a replacement to refill their roster of handsome male leads. They replaced Alexander with an Illinois college sportscaster called “Dutch”- Ronald Reagan..
1963- The Magic Castle opened in Hollywood. The Academy of Magicians renovated this 1908 mansion and declared it the worlds most unique private club. Even today, you can only get in by being invited by a member.
1975- In a letter to MITS, college kids Bill Gates and Paul Allen offered their computer language adaptation of BASIC for the new Altair personal computer. They named themselves Microsoft.
1984- The Zenith Corporation announced it would stop selling video recorders in Betamax format and go over wholly to VHS. Other electronics giants followed suit and VHS won out over the higher quality Beta system.
2000- Internet developers Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales, had a conversation about writing data entries for collaborative websites called wikis. Saunders conceived of an open on-line encyclopedia encompassing all world knowledge. He called it Wikipedia.
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