3 December

1560    Jan Gruter (born), Dutch critic and scholar (died 1627)

1842    Charles Alfred Pillsbury (born), American businessman, founded the Pillsbury Company (died 1899)

1888    Carl Zeiss (died), German lens maker (born 1816)

1894    Robert Louis Stevenson (died), Scottish author and poet (born 1850)

1895    Anna Freud (born), Austrian-English psychoanalyst (died 1982)

1901     US President Theodore Roosevelt delivers a 20,000-word speech to the House of Representatives asking the Congress to curb the power of trusts “within reasonable limits”.

1910     Modern neon lighting is first demonstrated by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor Show.

1927    Andy Williams (born), American singer and actor (died 2012)

1927    Putting Pants on Philip, the first Laurel and Hardy film, is released.

1943    J. Philippe Rushton (born), Canadian academic and theorist (died 2012)

1948    Ozzy Osbourne (born), English singer-songwriter and actor (Black Sabbath)

1953    Franz Klammer (born), Austrian skier

1960    The musical Camelot debuted at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway, and would become associated with the Kennedy administration.

1963    Terri Schiavo, American right to die patient (died 2005)

1964    Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on UC property.

1967    At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, a transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).

1973    Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.

1976    An assassination attempt is made on Bob Marley. He is shot twice, but plays a concert two days later.

1979    Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini becomes the first Supreme Leader of Iran.

1979    In Cincinnati, Ohio, 11 fans are suffocated in a crush for seats on the concourse outside Riverfront Coliseum before a Who concert.

1981     Walter Knott (died), American farmer, founded Knott’s Berry Farm (born 1889)

1982    A soil sample is taken from Times Beach, Missouri that will be found to contain 300 times the safe level of dioxin.

1984    A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

1989    In a meeting off the coast of Malta, US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev release statements indicating that the cold war between NATO and The Soviet Union may be coming to an end.

1992    A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world’s first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

1993    Lewis Thomas (died), American physician (born 1913)

1997    In Ottawa, Canada, representatives from 121 countries sign The Ottawa treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines. The United States, People’s Republic of China, and Russia do not sign the treaty, howeve

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EO Smith

Interests include biological anthropology, evolution, social behavior, and human behavior. Conducted field research in the Tana River National Primate Reserve, Kenya and on Angaur, Palau, Micronesia, as well as research with captive nonhuman primates at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and the Institute for Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya.
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