EVENTS: In 1477 John Paston received the first recorded Valentine letter in English, from Margery Brews; in 1852 the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, fitted with only ten beds, admitted its first patient; in 1895 Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened at the St James’s Theatre, London; in 1922 Marconi began regular broadcasting transmissions from Writtle in Essex; in 1939 the German battleship Bismarck was launched in the presence of Adolf Hitler; in 1989 Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a death threat against the British author Salman Rushdie and the publishers of The Satanic Verses, a novel condemned as blasphemous.
BIRTHS: Pier Francesco Cavalli, composer of more than 40 operas, born in Crema, Italy, 1602; Claude Prosper Crébillon, novelist whose works offer a satirical view of French 18th-century society, born in Paris, 1707; Thomas Malthus, economist and demographer who argued that growth in production would never equal population growth, which might be checked only by natural disasters or, as he later added, moral and sexual restraint, born in Rookery, Surrey, 1766; Christopher Sholes, who patented the “qwerty” typewriter keyboard design, born near Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, 1819; Margaret Knight, who invented the square-bottomed paper bag, born in York, Maine, US, USA, 1838; Frank Harris, chronicler of the glittering fin-de-siècle coterie which included Oscar Wilde, Kipling and George Bernard Shaw, whose own racy and unreliable biography My Life and Loves (banned for many years) helped to establish his image as a satyr, born in Galway, 1856; Israel Zangwill, writer and prominent Zionist, born in London, 1864; Quintin Hogg, an Etonian who disguised himself as a night-time shoe cleaner in order to experience the lives of deprived children, set up a “ragged school ” and subsequently founded the Polytechnic, born in London, 1845.
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DEATHS: King Richard II, reigned 1377-99, died at Pontefract Castle, South Yorkshire, 1400; John Hadley, optician and maker of telescopes whose reflecting octant of 1731 was the ancestor of the sextant, died in East Barnet, Hertfordshire, 1744; Captain James Cook, explorer, killed by Polynesian natives in Hawaii, 1779; Sir William Blackstone, first Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford, died in Wallingford, Berkshire, 1780; William Dyce, painter of frescoes in the House of Lords, died in London, 1864; William Tecumseh Sherman, Union general in the American Civil War, died in New York, 1891; Sir Pelham (P. G.) Wodehouse, writer and lyricist, died in Southampton, New York, 1975.