Happy Birthday May 10

American publisher James Gordon Bennett, Jr. was born on May 10, 1841. A successful publisher of the New York Herald, he sponsored explorers including Henry Morton Stanley's trip to Africa to find David Livingstone, and the ill-fated USS Jeannette attempt on the North Pole.

Portrait of James Gordon Bennett, Jr.

An outlandish international playboy, he’d turn up in restaurants drunk and cause havoc. Bennett's exploits gave rise to the exclamation ‘Gordon Bennett!’, to express shock.

Fred Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska on May 10, 1899. Fred began dancing at the age of four. Fred formed a child act with his sister, Adele, that became popular at the time. Their first act was called "Juvenile Artists Presenting an Electric Musical Toe-Dancing Novelty." Adele eventually married, leaving Astaire to begin his solo career. 

"Can't sing. Can't act. Slightly balding. Can dance a little." Fittingly, the studio toad who wrote that screen-test evaluation of a young Fred Astaire  is long forgotten, but the greatest dancer in movie history is not.

For more May 10 anniversaries, including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette becoming King and Queen of France, the Treaty of Frankfurt ending the Franco-Prussian War and the completion of the first submerged circumnavigation of Earth, check out OnThatDay.