Events: On this day in 1922 US President Warren G. Harding had the White House’s first radio installed. Two years later his successor, Calvin Coolidge, became the first president to broadcast from the White House, radio already having played a big role in his election victory as the largest radio audience ever had listened to the broadcast of his final campaign speech. The medium received the ultimate seal of approval in 1933 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt started using it to deliver regular updates of the national and international situation that became known as “fireside chats”. In 1924 the first execution by lethal gas of a convicted murderer took place in the USA; in 1965 Kenneth Robinson, British Health Minister, announced a ban on cigarette advertising on British television; in 1976 14 British mercenaries were executed by firing squad in Angola; in 1983 Shergar, the Aga Khan’s Derby winner, was kidnapped from stables in County Kildare and, despite a £2 million ransom demand, was never seen again.
Births: “How far the operations of this army contributed to the final overthrow of the Confederacy and the peace which now dawns upon us, must be judged by others, not by us; but that you have done all that men could do has been admitted by those in authority, and we have a right to join in the universal joy that fills our land because the war is over,” William T. Sherman told his troops in the field at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. One of the foremost generals of the Union Army, he was born in Lancaster, Ohio, on this day in 1820.
Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy, born in Lindley, Leicestershire, 1577; Daniel Bernoulli, mathematician, botanist, anatomist and physicist, born in Groningen, Netherlands, 1700; Jean Andr? Deluc, geologist and expert in Alpine natural history, born in Geneva, 1727; Richard Lander, explorer of the River Niger, born in Truro, Cornwall, 1804; John Ruskin, critic, artist and social reformer, born in London, 1819; Henry Walter Bates, naturalist who explored the Amazon, born in Leicester, 1825; Jules Verne, novelist, born in Nantes, France, 1828; Dmitri Mendeleyev, chemist who developed the periodic table, born in Tobolsk, Russia, 1834; Dame Edith Evans, actress remembered for her portrayal of Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest, born in London, 1888; King Vidor, film director, born in Galveston, Texas, 1894; James Dean, actor, born in Marion, Indiana, 1931.
Deaths: “I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag-heaps, and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag-heaps in the distance... pools of stagnant water.”. George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) was one of the books published by the Left Book Club, co-founded in 1936 by Sir Victor Gollancz, who died in London on this day in 1967.
Mary Queen of Scots, executed at Fotheringhay Castle, Northamptonshire, 1587; Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia 1682-1725, died in St Petersburg, 1725; Robert Southwell Bourke (6th Earl of Mayo), Viceroy of India 1869-72, assassinated in Port Blair, Andaman Islands, 1872; Berthold Auerbach, German novelist, died in Cannes, France, 1882; R.M. Ballantyne, Scottish author of adventure novels for boys, died in Rome, 1894; Peter Kropotkin, geographer and revolutionary, died in Dmitrov, Russia, 1921; William Bateson, biologist who became the first Professor of genetics at Cambridge (having coined the term genetics), died in Merton, Surrey, 1926; Dame Iris Murdoch, novelist and philosopher, died in Oxford, 1999.