1918 Upon signing The Act of Union, an agreement with Denmark, Iceland became a fully sovereign state under the Danish king.
1896 The Iaşi National Theatre, in Iaşi, Romania, was inaugurated. The inauguration festivities took place with Flechtenmacher’s National Overture, the vaudevilles Muza de la Burdujeni (The Muse from Burdujeni) by Costache Negruzzi and Cinel-cinel (The Riddle) by Vasile Alecsandri, as well as the verse comedy Poetul romantic (The Romantic Poet) by Matei Millo. The theatre is the oldest national theatre and one of the most prestigious theatrical institutions in Romania. With its neoclassic exterior and a richly decorated interior in Rococo and Baroque styles, the building is considered one of the most elegant in Romania.
1792 Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky was born in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia. His main achievement was the development (independently from János Bolyai) of a non-Euclidean geometry, also referred to as Lobachevskian geometry. Because of this, he is often called the Copernicus of Geometry.
1743 German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth was born in Wernigerode. His life’s work did much to improve and systematize the processes of analytical chemistry and mineralogy. He was the first to discover uranium and zirconium, and to characterize them as distinct elements. He wrote over 200 scientific papers and was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1804. The crater Klaproth on the Moon is named after him.
1580 French astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc was born in Belgentier, in southeastern France. His research included a determination of the difference in longitude of various locations in Europe, around the Mediterranean, and in North Africa. He also maintained a wide correspondence with scientists and was a successful organizer of scientific inquiry.
1525 Czech physician and astronomer Tadeáš Hájek was born in Prague. He was the personal physician of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II. His voluminous writings in Latin were mostly concerned with astronomy and many regarded him as the greatest astronomer of his time. The lunar crater Hagecius and the asteroid 1995 Hajek are named in his honour.
1974 NASA’s Pioneer 11 spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter. It passed to within 34,000 km of Jupiter’s cloud tops and obtained dramatic images of the Great Red Spot, made the first observation of the immense polar regions, and determined the mass of Jupiter’s moon Callisto.
1927 The Ford Motor Company sold the first Model A. 4,849,340 were produced between 1927 and 1931. Prices ranged from US $385 for a roadster to $1400 for the top-of-the-line Town Car.
1881 German physicist Heinrich Barkhausen was born in Bremen. He discovered the Barkhausen effect in 1919, a principle concerning changes in the magnetic properties of metal. With Karl Kurz, he developed the Barkhausen- Kurz oscillator in 1920 for ultrahigh frequencies (forerunner of the microwave tube), leading to understanding of the principle of velocity modulation. He is also known for experiments on shortwave radio transmissions.
1845 Manifest Destiny: US President James K. Polk, during his First Annual Message to Congress, announced that the United States should aggressively expand into the West. The phrase, first coined by journalist John L. O’Sullivan earlier in the year, described the general belief that the United States was destined, even divinely ordained, to expand across the North American continent.
1409 The University of Leipzig, one of the oldest universities in Europe and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany, was founded by Frederick I, Elector of Saxony and his brother William II, Margrave of Meissen.
1973 NASA’s Pioneer 10 space probe sent back the very first close-up images of Jupiter. This was also the first flyby of an outer planet.
1967 South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first human heart transplant. The operation lasted nine hours and used a team of thirty people.
1919 The Quebec Bridge officially opened. It crosses the lower St. Lawrence River to the west of Quebec City, and Lévis, Quebec, Canada.
1904 American-Argentine astronomer Charles Dillon Perrine discovered Himalia, a moon of Jupiter. It is the largest irregular satellite of Jupiter, the sixth largest overall in size, and the fifth largest in mass.
1838 American meteorologist Cleveland Abbe was born in New York City. He developed a system of telegraphic weather reports, daily weather maps, and weather forecasts which were later adopted by the U.S. Weather Bureau. He also invented the 4 standard time zones in the U.S., which were later put in use by the railroads and the government.
1965 NASA launched the Gemini 7 spacecraft, with astronauts Frank F. Borman II and Edward H. White II on board. The objective of the flight was to study the effects of a fortnight in space on the human body. The nearly fourteen days in space would double the length of time that anyone had been in space and would stand as the single longest spaceflight duration record for five years.
1816 American chemist Benjamin Silliman, Jr. was born. He investigated the potential uses of crude oil products and gave impetus to plans for drilling the first producing oil well in 1859. He pioneered the practice of separating the crude oil into its component parts, or its fractions, and observed the characteristics of each fraction.
1791 The first edition of The Observer, the world’s first Sunday newspaper, was published in London.
1619 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred, 20 miles upstream from Jamestown. The group’s charter required that the day of arrival be observed yearly as a “day of thanksgiving” to God, and this is considered to be the first Thanksgiving celebration in America.
1901 German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg was born in Würzburg, Germany. He made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum theory. He set forth the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925 and was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics.
1896 Austrian-American biochemist and pharmacologist Carl Ferdinand Cori was born in Prague. He received a Nobel Prize in 1947 for the discovery of how glycogen – a derivative of glucose – is broken down and resynthesized in the body, for use as a store and source of energy.
1492 Christopher Columbus first set foot on the island of Hispaniola, during his first voyage of discovery.
1884 Construction was completed on the Washington Monument in Washington D.C., when workers placed an aluminum-tipped lighting rod on the top. The monument was officially dedicated the next February.
1863 American inventor and engineer Charles Martin Hall was born in Thompson, Ohio. He is best known for his invention in 1886 of an inexpensive method for producing aluminum, which became the first metal to attain widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron.
1534 The city of Quito, Ecuador was founded in its present location by Spanish settlers led by Sebastián de Belalcázar.
by White History 1972 Apollo 17 was launched from Kennedy Space Center, in Florida. It was the first night launch of a U.S. human spaceflight and the sixth and final lunar landing mission of the Apollo program.
1940 The Fairey Barracuda, a British carrier-borne torpedo and dive bomber, was flown for the first time. It was the first of its type to be fabricated entirely from metal.
1905 Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper was born in Tuitjenhorn, in north Holland. He discovered Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and Nereid, a moon of Neptune. The Kuiper Belt is so-named after his original suggestion of its existence outside the orbit of Neptune before it was confirmed as a belt of small bodies. He was first to measur the diameter of Pluto. In the Martian atmosphere Kuiper detected carbon dioxide, but the absence of oxygen. In the 1960s, he helped identify landing sites on the moon for the Apollo program.
1888 Scottish inventor John Boyd Dunlop received a patent for the first practical pneumatic or inflatable tire, which he used on his son's tricycle.
1810 German physiologist Theodor Schwann was born. His many contributions to biology included the development of cell theory, the discovery of Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system, the discovery and study of pepsin, the discovery of the organic nature of yeast, and the invention of the term metabolism.
1864 The Clifton Suspension Bridge over the River Avon in North Somerset, England, officially opened.
1765 American inventor Eli Whitney, Jr. was born in Westborough, Massachusetts. He is most famous for inventing the cotton gin, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution. He also invented the first musket that could be manufactured with interchangeable parts, and one of the first milling machines.
1730 Dutch physiologist, biologist and chemist Jan Ingenhousz was born in Breda. He is famous for discovering that light is essential to plant cellular respiration, a vital step in the discovery of photosynthesis.
by White History 1968 American inventor Douglas Engelbart conducted a demonstration of his "oN-Line System", or NLS, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The NLS system was the first to employ the practical use of hypertext links, the mouse, raster-scan video monitors, information organized by relevance, screen windowing, presentation programs, and other modern computing concepts.
1742 German-Swedish pharmaceutical chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele was born in Stralsund, Germany. He made a number of chemical discoveries, such as oxygen, and identified molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen, and chlorine. Unfortunately for Scheele, others were often given credit for these discoveries since they were first to publish their findings.
1508 Dutch mathematician and cartographer Gemma Frisius was born in Dokkum, Friesland. He created important globes, improved the mathematical instruments of his day and applied mathematics in new ways to surveying and navigation. He described for the first time the method of triangulation still used today in surveying, and was the first to describe how an accurate clock could be used to determine longitude.
1425 The Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium's largest, oldest and most prominent university, was founded by Pope Martin V. It is the oldest Catholic university in the world still in existence today
by White History 1974 The Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) launched the Helios I space probe, with help from NASA. It is notable for having set in the mid-1970's a maximum speed record among spacecraft at 252,792 km/h (about 70km/s), also roughly 0.0002 times the speed of light.
1935 Jay Berwanger, an American football halfback at the University of Chicago, won the first Downtown Athletic Club Trophy, which was renamed the Heisman Trophy the next year. The trophy is awarded each year to the most outstanding player in collegiate football.
1868 The world's first traffic lights were installed outside the British Houses of Parliament in London, at the intersection of George and Bridge Streets. The work was done by the railway engineer J.P. Knight. The device was a revolving gas-powered lantern with a red and a green light. Knight's invention was similar to the railway signals of the time.
1815 Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, known simply as Ada Lovelace in modern times, was born in London. She is today appreciated as the first computer programmer since she was writing programs (actually encoding an algorithm in a form to be processed by a machine) for Charles Babbage's analytical engine.