The Almanac, Celebrity Birthdays, Today in History, October 10 Today is Thursday, Oct. 10, the 283rd day of 2013 with 82 to follow. They include English chemist-physicist Henry Cavendish, discoverer of hydrogen, in 1731; Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi in 1813; actor Helen Hayes in 1900; jazz musician Thelonious Monk in 1917; writer James Clavell and filmmaker Ed Wood, both in 1924; British playwright and Nobel laureate Harold Pinter in 1930; actor Peter Coyote in 1941 (age 72); singer John Prine and entertainer Ben Vereen, both in 1946 (age 67); actor Jessica Harper in 1949 (age 64); writer Nora Roberts in 1950 (age 63); rocker David Lee Roth in 1954 (age 59); country singer Tanya Tucker in 1958 (age 55); actor Bradley Whitford in 1959 (age 54); slain journalist Daniel Pearl in 1963; football star Brett Favre in 1969 (age 44); actor Mario Lopez in 1973 (age 40); and race car driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. in 1974 (age 39). In 1845, the U.S. Naval Academy was formally opened at Fort Severn, Annapolis, Md., with 50 midshipmen in the first class. In 1886, Griswold Lorillard of Tuxedo Park, N.Y., fashioned the first tuxedo for men. In 1963, a dam burst in northern Italy, drowning an estimated 3,000 people. In 1973, Spiro Agnew became the first U.S. vice president to resign in disgrace after pleading no contest to income tax evasion. In 1985, movie legend Orson Welles, whose remarkably innovative "Citizen Kane" of 1941 was regarded by many as the best American-made film of all time, died of a heart attack at the age of 70. In 1994, Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras, commander in chief of the Haitian armed forces, resigned to make way for the return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. In 1995, Israel freed about 900 Palestinian prisoners and pulled its troops out of four towns as the second phase of a peace plan was implemented on the West Bank. In 1997, major tobacco companies agreed to a settlement in a class-action lawsuit by 60,000 flight attendants who said second-hand smoke in planes had caused cancer and other diseases. In 2003, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Iranian lawyer Shurin Ebadi for her work in promoting democracy and human rights in Iran and beyond. She was the first Muslim woman to win the award. In 2005, Angela Merkel became the first woman chancellor of Germany after her Christian Democrats won the parliamentary election. In 2008, Connecticut became the third state in the United States to legalize same-sex marriages, following California and Massachusetts. In 2009, NASA deliberately crashed a hunk of space junk on the surface of the moon to check whether certain lunar craters held significant deposits of water. In 2011, the National Basketball Association, caught up in a contract dispute, postponed the first two weeks of the season, set to open Nov. 1, then canceled the entire November schedule and followed with a player lockout. The NBA ended up with a reduced season -- 66 games instead of 82. In 2012, actor and former football star Alex Karras died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 77. Karras was a member of the College Football Hall of Fame and a four-time NFL Pro Bowler. A thought for the day: Queen Elizabeth I said, "I have the heart of a man, not a woman, and I am not afraid of anything."