1895: Buckminster Fuller, inventor, engineer, and philosopher, was born in Massachusetts. He was famous for using the icosahedron shape in building design.

1817: Writer, philosopher, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau's advocacy of simple, principled living remains compelling, while his writings on the relationship between people and the environment helped define the nature essay. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau held a series of odd jobs. Encouraged by Concord neighbor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, he started publishing essays, poems, and reviews in the transcendentalist magazine The Dial. His essay Natural History of Massachusetts (1842) revealed his talent for writing about nature. From 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived in a cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, a small glacial lake near Concord. Guided by the maxim "Simplify, simplify," he strictly limited his expenditures, his possessions, and his contact with others. His goal: "To live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." (Source: Library of Congress)