Today in History: September 10

1823: The Champlain Canal, which connects Lake Champlain with the Hudson River and (via the Erie Canal) the Great Lakes, is opened.

1839: Publisher Isaac Kaufmann Funk is born at Clifton, Ohio.  An ordained Lutheran minister, he’ll start his own publishing company in 1876 with a college classmate, Adam Willis Wagnalls.

1846: Elias Howe gets a patent for the first U.S. sewing machine using a lock stitch.  When Isaac Singer uses Howe’s patent to make his sewing machines, Howe’s income will go from $300 to $200,000 a year.

1889: Legal realist and judge Jerome New Frank is born at New York City.

1890: Couturier Elsa Schiaparelli is born at Rome, Italy.  In 1931 she’ll invent what she calls a “divided skirt,” but others will call “tennis shorts.”

1897: At the A.D. Pardee & Co.  mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania, a county sheriff’s posse opens fire on labor demonstrators, killing 19 Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian immigrant workers and wounding 40 more.

1977: A one-legged 27-year-old Tunisian immigrant becomes the last person to be executed by guillotine in France.