August 10 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on August 10

• Herbert Hoover (1874)

  31st President of the United States, whose presidency was dominated by the onset of the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash.

• Antonio Banderas (1960)

  Spanish actor known for his collaborations with director Pedro Almodovar and for roles including Zorro and the voice of Puss in Boots.

• Rosanna Arquette (1959)

  American actress known for Desperately Seeking Susan and Pulp Fiction.

• Eddie Fisher (1928)

  American singer and one of the most popular pop vocalists of the early 1950s, known for hits including 'Oh! My Pa-Pa.'

This Day in History

• 1821 — Missouri was admitted to the Union as the 24th U.S. state, a settlement reached through the Missouri Compromise over the extension of slavery into new states.

• 1846 — The Smithsonian Institution was founded by act of the United States Congress, using funds bequeathed by British scientist James Smithson to establish an institution for 'the increase and diffusion of knowledge.'

• 1990 — NASA's Magellan spacecraft entered orbit around Venus, beginning a mission that used radar to map nearly the entire surface of the cloud-covered planet.

What August 10 Says About You

Institutions and their staying power give August 10 a quieter, more structural character than most dates on the calendar, which suits a birthday list heavier on builders and re-inventors than headline-grabbers. Herbert Hoover, born on this date in 1874, is remembered almost entirely for the institution-scale crisis that overtook his presidency — the Great Depression arrived barely seven months into his term, and no amount of prior competence as a mining engineer and relief administrator (his actual, genuinely impressive earlier career) fully rehabilitated his reputation afterward. The Smithsonian Institution, founded by act of Congress on this same date in 1846, took an odd bequest from a British scientist who never set foot in the United States and turned it into what's now one of the largest museum and research complexes in the world — an institution built, unusually, on a foreigner's faith in an idea rather than a government's own initiative. Missouri's 1821 admission to the Union came through the Missouri Compromise, a piece of institutional deal-making that temporarily managed the slavery question by pairing the state's admission with Maine's, a fix that held for a few decades before the underlying conflict outgrew it. Antonio Banderas, born on this date in 1960, built his own kind of durable institution across genres, moving from Almodovar's Spanish art-house films to Hollywood action roles to voicing an animated cat with more range than either extreme might suggest was possible from one actor. Rosanna Arquette and Eddie Fisher, the date's other notable births, both built careers during periods when their industries were reinventing themselves — Arquette in the 1980s American independent film scene, Fisher amid the earliest wave of postwar pop stardom before rock and roll rewrote the rules entirely. NASA's Magellan spacecraft, entering Venus orbit on this date in 1990, mapped a planet that had been almost entirely hidden from view under permanent cloud cover, turning decades of educated guessing about Venus's surface into actual radar data. As a Leo date, August 10 carries the sign's confidence, expressed here less through spotlight-seeking than through founding and sustaining things meant to outlast any one person — a national museum, a mapped planet, a film career built across three different national cinemas. The numerology day number for the 10th reduces to 1, tied to leadership and new beginnings, a fitting number for a date whose signature achievement is a Congressional act that's still funding research nearly two centuries later. Fisher's early-1950s pop stardom, brief as it looks in hindsight next to the rock era that displaced it, was itself a genuine beginning for the modern teen-idol model that later stars, from Elvis onward, would refine.