Today in history–February 7

1478: Lord Chancellor, fantasy writer, and martyr Sir Thomas More is born, the son of a King’s Bench judge, at London.

1795: The 11th amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified.

1811: A massive earthquake at New Madrid, Missouri, rings church bells in Boston, Massachusetts.

1812: Charles Dickens, who will give up a career as an aspiring lawyer for journalism and fiction, is born at Portsmouth.

1914: Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río Hernández is born at Barcelona.  After assassinating Leon Trotsky in his study with an ice pick, he will be welcomed in Cuba and made Hero of the Soviet Union in 1961.

1920: One of the pioneers of the personal computer revolution, An Wang, is born in Shanghai, China.  Emigrating to the U.S. his Wang Laboratories will eventually have 30,000 employees.

1922: DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace begin distributing 5,000 copies of their new magazine, Reader’s Digest.  Today its circulation is over 12 million.

1938: Harvey Samuel Firestone, a Detroit buggy salesman who saw some merit in the new “horseless carriage” and started his own little tire company in Akron, dies at Miami Beach, Florida.

1943: The U.S. government announces that it will begin rationing shoes.

1969: Singer Tom Jones’s new show appears on ABC television, after the network pays $20 million to a British production company for the rights.

1985: Sports Illustrated magazine discovers that sex sells better than football, as its “Swimsuit Edition” becomes the biggest issue in its history.