November 2 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on November 2

• Marie Antoinette (1755)

  Queen consort of France whose reign ended in execution during the French Revolution, and who has become a symbol, fair or not, of aristocratic excess.

• Daniel Boone (1734)

  American pioneer and frontiersman whose explorations helped open Kentucky to westward settlement.

• Burt Lancaster (1913)

  American actor and Academy Award winner known for From Here to Eternity and Elmer Gantry.

• k.d. lang (1961)

  Canadian singer-songwriter known for her contralto voice and the hit song Constant Craving.

• Nelly (1974)

  American rapper known for hits including Hot in Herre and Dilemma.

This Day in History

• 1917 — The Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government, expressing support for the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

• 1920 — Pittsburgh radio station KDKA broadcast the results of the Harding–Cox presidential election, widely cited as the first commercial radio broadcast in the United States.

• 1936 — The BBC Television Service launched in London, generally regarded as the world's first regular, high-definition public television broadcasting service.

What November 2 Says About You

Communication technology keeps circling back to November 2, and the pattern is hard to miss once you notice it. In 1920, a fledgling Pittsburgh radio station broadcast presidential election returns and, in doing so, more or less invented American commercial radio as an industry almost by accident — KDKA had only recently gone on air and its owner, Westinghouse, mainly wanted to sell more radio receivers. Then, in 1936, this same date produced a second broadcasting milestone when engineers in London switched on the BBC Television Service, the first regular high-definition public broadcast anywhere, using a mechanical and electronic system that early viewers would barely recognize as television today. A birthday sitting between those two anniversaries has, without asking for it, become associated with the moment information first learned to travel instantly to a mass audience. That's a fitting backdrop for a Scorpio birthday, since Scorpios are typically credited with a sharp instinct for what's really being said underneath a broadcast, a headline, or a public statement — a useful trait on a date whose signature historical events are all, in one way or another, about the machinery of mass communication. The 2nd carries the numerology day number 2, a number traditionally tied to partnership, diplomacy, and reading a room — which sits a little in tension with Scorpio's more solitary, guarded reputation, and that tension is worth noting honestly rather than smoothed over, since not every trait cluster resolves into one tidy personality. The Balfour Declaration, also issued on this date in 1917 by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in a letter to Lord Rothschild, ran to a single paragraph of carefully hedged diplomatic language, yet it reshaped decades of subsequent history in the Middle East, a case study in how much weight a brief, precisely worded public statement can carry. Among the people born on November 2, Marie Antoinette's life became, after her execution, almost entirely a matter of how her image was communicated and distorted by others long after she could answer for herself, which makes an odd but real thread connecting her birthday to a date otherwise stacked with broadcasting firsts. Burt Lancaster, born in 1913, built a screen career on parts that required exactly the kind of intensity beneath a controlled surface that Scorpios are stereotypically said to carry, an actor known as much for physical restraint as for outward charisma. Nelly, born on this date in 1974, helped popularize a distinctly regional St. Louis rap sound to a national radio audience, itself a small broadcasting story of its own. November's birthstone, topaz, is prized partly for the way it holds and refracts light rather than simply reflecting it back — not a bad metaphor for a birthday whose historical record keeps returning to how messages travel and what happens to them once they're sent out into the world. The chrysanthemum, the month's birth flower, rounds out a birthday grounded equally in old aristocratic history and in whatever era's newest broadcasting technology happened to be available.