Today in history @ 14 Feb

Famous birthdays

a. Japanese inventor and industrialist Sakichi Toyoda (b. 1867). The son of a poor carpenter, Toyoda is referred to as the "King of Japanese Inventors". He invented numerous weaving devices. His most famous invention was the automatic power loom in which he implemented the principle of Jidoka (autonomous automation). The principle of Jidoka, which means that the machine stops itself when a problem occurs, became later a part of the Toyota Production System.

He is the founder of Toyota Industries Corporation.

b. Indian film actress Madhubala (born Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi, b. 1933). She is also considered to be one of the most beautiful actresses to have worked in the industry, and is highly regarded as "The Venus of Indian Cinema" and "The Beauty with Tragedy”.

c. Leading industrialist Sir Biren Mookherjee (b. 1899). He established the steel making facilities at IISCO, Burnpur

d. American businessman, author, politician, and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg (b. 1942). Bloomberg is the founder, CEO, and owner of Bloomberg L.P., a global financial services, mass media, and software company that bears his name, and is notable for its Bloomberg Terminal, a computer software system providing financial data widely used in the global financial services industry.

e. British businessman Sir Martin Stuart Sorrell (b. 1945). He is the CEO of WPP.

f. American economist Eugene Fama (b. 1939). He is widely recognized as the "father of modern finance” and is best known for his empirical work on portfolio theory, asset pricing and the ‘Efficient Market hypothesis’. He is the 2013 Nobel laureate in economic sciences.

g. German born mathematician Edmund Landau (b. 1877). He worked in the fields of number theory and complex analysis. Landau studied mathematics at the University of Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1899 (aged 22) and his habilitation (the post-doctoral qualification required in German universities) in 1901 (aged 24). His doctoral thesis was 14 pages long.

h. American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes (b. 1819). He co-invented the QWERTY keyboard

Famous death anniversaries

a. British explorer, navigator, cartographer James Cook (d. 1779). Cook made detailed maps of Newfoundland prior to making three voyages to the Pacific Ocean, during which he achieved the first recorded European contact with the eastern coastline of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands, and the first recorded circumnavigation of New Zealand.

b. English author and one of the most widely-read humorists of the 20th century Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (d. 1975). He wrote more than 90 books and more than 20 film scripts and collaborated on more than 30 plays and musical comedies.

c. Italian-American mobster Vito "Don Vitone" Genovese (d. 1969). He was known as Boss of all Bosses from 1957 to 1959 when he ruled one of the most powerful, richest and dangerous criminal organizations in the world and maintained power and influence over other crime families in America.

The Genovese crime family is one of the "Five Families" that dominate organized crime activities in New York City and New Jersey as part of the Mafia (or Cosa Nostra). The Genovese crime family has been nicknamed the "Ivy League" and "Rolls Royce" of organized crime.

d. British evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (d. 1975). He was a proponent of natural selection. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund and the first President of the British Humanist Association.

e. Leading American ornithologist James Bond (d. 1989). He was an expert on the birds of the Caribbean. His name was appropriated by writer Ian Fleming for his fictional British spy of the same name.

f. American physicist and radio engineer Karl Guthe Jansky (d. 1950). He first discovered radio waves emanating from the Milky Way in August 1931. He is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy.

g. British machine tool innovator, tool and die maker, and inventor Henry Maudslay (d. 1831). He invented machines of fundamental importance to the Industrial Revolution; of these the metal lathe is perhaps the most outstanding. He also invented methods for printing calico cloth and for desalting seawater for ships’ boilers, and he perfected a measuring machine that was accurate to 0.0001 inch. He was the first to realize the critical importance in a machine shop of accurate plane surfaces for guiding the tools; he produced for his workmen standard planes so smooth that they adhered when placed atop each other and could be separated only by sliding.

Famous events

a. 1924 Thomas J. Watson renames the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) as International Business Machines (IBM).

b. The Knesset (Israeli Parliament) was established in 1949.

c. 1989 Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie and his publishers due to his novel "Satanic Verses". A bounty was also place on his head.

d. Youtube founded in 2005.