EVENTS: On this day in 1853 the American inventor and manufacturer Elisha Graves Otis opened a factory on the banks of the Hudson River in Yonkers for the production of the first modern passenger lift. Otis had developed a brake that would catch and hold the car if its cable broke or otherwise failed. At the Crystal Palace Exposition in New York, Otis gave a dramatic demonstration of his new Safety Elevator, ordering the cable to be cut with an axe while he was suspended in a car some distance above the floor. The mechanism held.
In 451 the Romans defeated the Huns under Attila at the Battle of Chalons; in 1643 Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex defeated the Royalist army at the first Battle of Newbury; in 1928 the Italian Chamber of Deputies was taken over by the Fascists; in 1931 Britain came off the gold standard; in 1946 the first Cannes film festival opened; in 1992 French voters approved the Maastricht Treaty on European Union by 51 percent.
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BIRTHS: King Chulalongkorn, who was born on this day in 1853, was the first king of Siam to leave the country, visiting Singapore and India and twice travelling to Europe. One of his country’s great reforming kings, he maintained the preservation of Siam’s independence at a time of European colonial expansion, the modernisation of its government and the opening of the country’s first railway in 1896.In his boyhood he was educated by European tutors, among them Anna Leonowen. Her memoirs formed the basis for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I.
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Sir James Dewar, natural philosopher and inventor of the vacuum flask, Kincardine-on-Forth, 1842; Sir George Robey, comedian, London, 1869; Upton Sinclair, novelist, Baltimore, Maryland, 1878; Stevie Smith (pseudonym of Florence Smith), poet, Hull, 1902; Kenneth More, actor, Gerrards Cross, 1914.
DEATHS: The haunting Elizabethan poem Tichborne’s Elegy, also known by its first line, “My prime of youth is but a frost of cares”, was written by the Roman Catholic conspirator Chidiock Tichborne while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. The stanzas are Tichborne’s only known work and formed part of a letter he wrote to his wife, Agnes, on the eve of his execution for treason in the Babington Plot to murder Elizabeth I. He was executed at Tower Hill on this day in 1586.
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Robert Emmet, Irish patriot, executed, Dublin, 1803; Jacob Grimm, philologist and collector of folk tales, Berlin, 1863; Annie Besant, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, Adyar, Madras, 1933; Jean Sibelius, composer, Jarvenpaa, Finland, 1957; George Seferis, poet (Nobel laureate 1963), Athens, 1971; Jim Croce singer and songwriter, killed in a plane crash, Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1973; Gherman Titov, Soviet cosmonaut and the second person to orbit the Earth, 2000.