Birthdays: Pope Gregory XIII, Beau Brummel, Paul Gauguin, Chick Corea, George Szell, Tom Jones, Jessica Tandy, James Ivory, Virginia McKenna, Prince, Kendall O’Connor, Liam Neeson is 72, Bill Hader, Dean DeBlois
1927- A daredevil named Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly climbed on top of a flagpole on top of a bank in Newark, New Jersey, and sat there for eight days straight. This stunt was covered by the media almost as much as Charles Lindbergh’s flight. It made a national craze for flagpole-sitting.
1930- Mines Field was rededicated as Los Angeles Municipal Airport. (LAX)
1937- Screen goddess Jean Harlow, the original Platinum Blonde, died of kidney failure. She was only 26.
1942- Japanese troops stormed the beaches at Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians Islands, Alaska, the first foreign soldiers on U.S. soil since the British redcoats in 1814.
1946- In 1939 the BBC had begun broadcasting on the new medium of television. On Sept 3rd, they interrupted a broadcast of the 1933 Walt Disney cartoon Mickey’s Gala Premiere to announce the declaration of war with Germany, WW2. They shut down for the duration. Seven years later, on this day, BBC-1 television restarted back up with this announcement. “ Good Afternoon. Well now, where were we?” And they started by running the same Mickey cartoon again.
1954- Scientist Alan Turing helped break the WWII German Enigma Code and is considered one of the fathers of the computer. Some people referred to early computers as Turing Machines. He predicted one day computers would be able to think like humans, and one day we would play games on our computers. But when Turing was revealed to be gay, he lost his top security clearance and was sentenced to a mental institution to undergo chemical castration. He was convicted with the same law used to jail Oscar Wilde in 1895. Alan Turing was a fan of the Disney film Snow White. This day he laced an apple with cyanide and bit into it. He was 42.
1955- The TV quiz show, The $64,000 Question premiered.
1975- This day Sony announced the first home videotape playing system, the Betamax. They were about $25,000 each, but we were promised as they became more popular the price would come down.
1993- Rockstar Prince celebrated his birthday by changing his name to a funny symbol no keyboard can reproduce and no one can say. He did it because of a dispute with Warner Records who said because of his contract he could not issue recordings under his own name. In 2000 he switched back to Prince.
2002 –Kim Possible premiered on TV.
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