On this date in history, two elements were isolated – aluminum in 1886 and plutonium in 1941. Also, we certainly know that in 1927 German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to a fellow physicist laying out his uncertainty principle for the first time.

This is the traditional date on which the Gutenberg Bible was published – the first book printed with movable type. Four businessmen meeting in Chicago formed the world’s first service organization – Rotary. And the first mass inoculation of children against polio occurred in Pittsburgh using the Salk vaccine.

There were four notable births on this date. The great composer of Messiah, George Freidrich Handel in 1685. American sociologist, historian, activist and co-founder of the NAACP – W.E.B. Du Bois in 1868. American journalist and historian who gave us the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L Shirer, was born in 1904. And the person most remembered for a date in August of 1942 – Paul Tibbets – American general and pilot of the Enola Gay – which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima – was born in 1915.

We bade farewell to the romantic poet John Keats in 1821, gone far too soon. John Quincy Adams, our 6th president passed in 1848. The composer most remembered at graduation -Pomp and Circumstance – Sir Edward Elgar – ceased to play in 1934. We lost comedy legend Stan Laurel (or Laurel and Hardy) in 1965. And English vet and author James Herriot laid down his pen in 1995.