For those of you who wonder where all this changing of clocks began, back in 1918 near the end of the First World War, the US Congress established time zones and approved daylight savings time on this date. In 1920 the US Senate decided we didn’t want to be a part of helping the world peacefully resolve conflicts (apparently) and rejected the Treaty of Versailles – and the League of Nations it planned – for the second time. But in 1979 the US House began broadcasting day-to-day proceedings on C-SPAN and still does.

This of course was aided, in a far-off way,, by the work of Auguste and Louis Lumiere who recorded their first video footage in 1895 using their newly patented cinematograph. On the other hand in 1931 Governor Fred B Balzar signed a bill legalizing gambling in Nevada, with all its shady dealings. And in 1982 Argentinian forces landed on South Georgia Island sparking the Falklands War with far-off Great Britain.

The 1800s gave birth to Scottish missionary and Africa explorer David Livingstone (1813), wild west sheriff and gunman Wyatt Earp (1848), notable orator and thrice-presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (1860),, and future standout US Supreme Court Justice and defender of civil liberties Earl Warren (1891).

The 1900s gave us justice John Sirica (1904) of Watergate and Nixon tapes fame, Mexican chemist Mario Molina (1943), who did serious work on identifying the Antarctic ozone hole, and Nazi mass murderer Adolph Eichmann(1906), whose public trial in Israel in 1960 proved that even the worst world criminal madmen can and should face world justice in a court of law.

We also welcomed in Glenn Close (1947) and Bruce Willis 1955) who just intrigued and entertained us in films spanning decades.

We said farewell to yet another Pope – Clement XI (1721) a religious verbal bomb thrower – Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, and a scientist Guiseppi Mercali (1914), who when the earth shook, devised a scale to tell us how intense it was.

A couple of prolific authors laid down their pens on this date: Edgar Rice Burroughs (1950) of Tarzan and John Clark on Mars fame; and Arthur C Clarke (2008) of 2001 A Space Odyssey and sequels – taking us to Jupiter and beyond.