On November 18, 1307, legend has it, William Tell shot a crossbow bolt to pierce an apple, toppling it off his son’s head. He was forced to do this by the local Austrian authority, whose hat hung on a pole in the Altdorf town square Tell had refused to bow to when entering the village. Tell endures as a Swiss folk hero, and provides the subject of a famous opera by Rossini — the music of which is associated with, in many ears, Bugs Bunny and the Lone Ranger.
In 1926, on this date, George Bernard Shaw formally refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize for Literature, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”