James Dean made his television—and professional acting—debut on this date in 1950. He was 19 years old, and he was one of several young people seen in a live, minute-long TV ad for Pepsi-Cola.

The young people are at a party, and Dean puts money in the player piano, as seen in the photo at top. The piano doesn’t work and Dean “fixes” it.

The ad (after the jump);
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Guglielmo Marconi reported the successful reception of the first transatlantic radio signal on this date in 1901. He had built a station in Cornwall, the far southwest of England, and then traveled to Canada, to a far eastern point in Newfoundland called Signal Hill. (In the photo at top, Marconi is seen on the left directing his associates as they raise a kite with an antenna attached. They are atop Signal Hill.)

The message, three repeated clicks, which is Morse code for the letter S, was sent from the Cornwall transmitter at an appointed time, and, at that appointed time, something—one click or was it three? You heard it, too, right?—something was heard at Signal Hill. At the time of the transmission, the entire route was in sunlight.
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The Mona Lisa (above) was found on this date 103 years ago. The painting, already one of the most famous in the world, had been stolen two years earlier from its spot on a wall in the Musée du Louvre in Paris by an Italian worker, Vincenzo Peruggia, who later claimed that he stole it to return one of Italy’s most famous works to its home country.

The real story was less patriotic than that and more banal: the Mona Lisa was the only painting that Peruggia could fit under his arm, as he was only 5’3″. Further, he did not know that Leonardo da Vinci himself had given the painting to his French patron, the King of France, Francis I, so it belonged in the Louvre and nowhere else. And, of course, he stole it for money: Peruggia tried to sell the painting, and he even called the Mona Lisa his “lottery ticket” in a letter home.
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