Welsh-born scientist and professor of music David Edward Hughes was born on May 16, 1831. The first
microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone (then called transmitter). This was independently developed by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US in the mid 1870s. Hughes' microphone used a piece of pine board to pick up sound.
Herman Webster Mudgett, more commonly known as H. H. Holmes, was born on May 16, 1861. He was the first recognized
serial killer in United States history. While he confessed to 27 murders, only nine could be plausibly confirmed. Holmes, who sold the skeletons of his victims to medical science, was hanged in Philadelphia in 1896.
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Full confession of Holmes |
The gymnast
Olga Korbut was born on May 16, 1955, in Grodno, Belorussian S.S.R. (now Belarus). Korbut captivated the world at the 1972 Olympics at Munich with her lithe grace and charm. She won a gold medal as a member of the winning Soviet team, as well as individual golds in the beam and floor exercises. The Associated Press awarded her the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Trophy, which had not been given to a competitor from the Soviet Union or its satellite countries since 1931.
For more May 16 anniversaries, including the first known public performance in Britain to use a piano, the marriage of Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste (later Louis XVI of France) and the first optical laser, check out
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