Birthdays: Joseph Jacquard- of the Jacquard Loom 1752, Gustav Mahler, Satchel Page, Ringo Starr is 83, Doc Severinsen, Robert Heinlein, William Kuntsler, Gian Carlo Menotti, animator Ken Harris, Shelley Duval is 74, Ted Cassidy-Lurch in the Adams Family, Michelle Kwan, David McCullough, Pierre Cardin, and according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this is the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. John Watson.
1814- Sir Walter Scott published his first novel Waverly. He wrote it under a pseudonym because he worried novel-writing would damage his reputation as a poet.
1895-THE FIRST SUNDAY COMICS - The first modern comic strip, Hogan’s Alley featuring "The Yellow Kid" by Richard Felton Outcault, debuts in the Sunday edition of Josef Pulitzer's New York World. The strip was so popular it gave the name "Yellow Journalism" to the sensationalist tabloid press. Newspaper comics at this time were the mass media of the day. For people who couldn’t afford a theater ticket and couldn’t yet speak English, the little characters in the penny papers were extremely popular and made celebrities out of cartoonists like Outcault, Bud Selig, George McManus, and Winsor McCay. Richard Outcault later invented the backend deal, when he asked for a percentage of all sales from his new comic strip "Buster Brown and his dog Tige”.
1936 - RCA shows the first true TV program: dancing, a short film on locomotives, a Bonwit Teller fashion show & monologue from the Tobacco Road radio comedy show.
1946- After the War, the BBC television service resumes and an announcer says:" Well now, where were we?" They continued the Mickey cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premier from where it was interrupted in 1939. World War II probably held back for a decade the development of television.
1946- Millionaire aviator Howard Hughes crashed an experimental airplane into four homes in Beverly Hills. Hughes had crashed planes before without much injury, but this crash left him near death. His slow recuperation left him with a lifetime addiction to morphine and codeine.
1947- THE ROSWELL INCIDENT- An official news report from the USAF 509th bomber command -the same unit that dropped the Hiroshima bomb- stated they had recovered the wreckage of a UFO in the New Mexico desert near Roswell and were examining it. The next day the commanding general of the 8th Air Force arrived in Roswell. He announced to the press that the earlier report was an error, and it was only a downed weather balloon. The wreckage was removed under heavy-armed guard.
Complete secrecy was then imposed. The communications officer Major Jesse Marcel, who posed for an official photo showing him with the balloon wreckage, later told his son the photo was faked. Marcel, who died in 1967 and his adjutant Lt. Haut still stick to the original version of their story. Lt. Haut also claimed the base commander Col. William Blanchard thought it was UFO debris. This report coming only two weeks after the first modern sighting of "flying saucers" over Mt. Rainier in Oregon sparked the Flying Saucer craze that gripped America throughout the 1950’s.
1949- "I’m Friday"- The program Dragnet first debuted on radio. It later became a hit on TV as well. Jack Webb conceived, wrote, directed and starred in the show. His hardest job was urging actors "not to act" but to speak the lines normally like the average person does.
1957- Former MGM animation directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera filed papers to incorporate their new company, Hanna - Barbera Enterprises, Inc.
1958- Al and Jerry Lapin opened the first International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant in Toluca Lake California.
1960- First demonstration of a practical laser beam. In Russia it had been theorized since 1951. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or LASER.
1967- Vivien Leigh, the actress who played Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, collapsed and died from recurrent tuberculosis. She was 53.
1967 - Beatles' "All You Need is Love" is released. Queen Elizabeth II said it was one of her favorite songs.
1967 – The Doors' "Light My Fire" hits #1.
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