1485 - Henry VII of England founded the Yeoman of the Guard (Beefeaters) to guard Royal Palaces in London.
1580 - English explorer Sir Francis Drake completed his circumnavigation of the world when his ship, the 'Golden Hind', arrived back at Plymouth on the south coast of England.
1925 - In his workshop in London, Scotsman John Logie Baird achieved the transmission of the first television pictures using the head of a dummy as his image source.. He then persuaded a 15 year old office boy, William Taynton, to sit in front of a camera, becoming the first live person captured on camera.
1938 - A radio play entitled "The War of the Worlds" and starring Orson Welles aired. It was a hoax portraying a Martian invasion; many people panicked, believing the portrayal to be true.
1961 - The Soviet Union tested a hydrogen bomb.
1974 - Muhammad Ali knocked out George Foreman in the eighth round of a 15-round bout in Kinshasa, Zaire, to regain his world heavyweight title.
2002 – British Digital terrestrial television (DTT) Service Freeview begins transmitting in parts of the United Kingdom.
Halloween
1903 - Hampden Park football ground - Glasgow, was opened.
1915 - For the first time during World War I, British troops wore steel helmets.
1941 - The Mount Rushmore National Memorial was completed after 14 years -
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1951 - In Britain, zebra crossings came into use for the first time.
1952 - The U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
1982 - The Thames barrier, part of London's flood defences, was raised for the first time.
1992 - The Vatican formally rehabilitated Galileo Galilei, who was forced by the Inquisition in 1633 to recant his assertion that the Earth orbits the Sun.
1999 – Yachtsman Jesse Martin returns to Melbourne after 11 months of circumnavigating the world, solo, non-stop and unassisted.
1512 – The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted by Michelangelo, is exhibited to the public for the first time.
1755 – In Portugal, Lisbon is destroyed by a massive earthquake and tsunami, killing between sixty thousand and ninety thousand people.
1848 - WH Smith opened its first railway bookstall at Euston Station in London.
1858 - Following the bloody events of the Indian Mutiny, Queen Victoria was proclaimed ruler of India, replacing the reign of the East India Company.
1884 - The International Meridian Conference set up time zones for the world and adopted a treaty making Greenwich, England, the Prime Meridian.
1911 – The first dropping of a bomb from an airplane in combat, during the Italo-Turkish War.
1959 - The first stretch of the M1 motorway linking London with the North of England was opened.
1982 - A new terrestrial television channel, Channel Four, began transmitting its first programme - the word game 'Countdown'.
1993 - The Maastricht Treaty came into effect, formally establishing the European Union. Great Britain, France, Germany, the Irish Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands agreed to work together on economic integration, common foreign and security policies, and cooperation between police and other authorities on crime, terrorism, and immigration issues.
1721 - Peter the Great, the czar of Russia, changed his title to emperor to be more in line with European thinking. He also founded the new Russian capital of St. Petersburg.
1896 - The first motor insurance policies were issued in Britain, but they excluded damage caused by frightened horses.
1903 - London's Daily Mirror newspaper was first published.
1924 - Almost 11 years after its appearance in America, the first crossword puzzle was published in a British newspaper, sold to the Sunday Express by C.W. Shepherd.
1963 - Gerry & the Pacemakers reached the number one spot with 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.
2000 - The first crew arrives at the International Space Station.
1507 - Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint Lisa Gherardini, the "Mona Lisa."
1534 - England's Parliament met and passed an Act of Supremacy which made King Henry VIII head of the English church, a role formerly held by the Pope.
1838 – The Times of India, the world's largest circulated English language daily broadsheet newspaper is founded as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce.
1839 - The first Opium War between China and Britain began.
1913 – The United States introduces an income tax.
1957 - The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2 with the dog Laika, the first living creature in space, on board.
1973 – Mariner program: NASA launches the Mariner 10 toward Mercury. On March 29, 1974, it becomes the first space probe to reach that planet.
1975 - Queen Elizabeth II opened the North Sea pipeline - the first to be built underwater - bringing ashore 400,000 barrels a day to Grangemouth Refinery on the Firth of Forth in Scotland.
1650 - William III, King of England, Scotland and Ireland was born (in Holland). On the day after his 38th birthday he landed at Torbay with an army of English and Dutch troops and when Parliament declared the throne empty, he was proclaimed king.
1854 - Florence Nightingale and her nurses arrived in the Crimea.
1890 - The Prince of Wales travelled by the underground electric railway from King William Street to the Oval to mark the opening of what is now the City Branch of the Northern Line. It was the first electrified underground railway system.
1922 - English explorers Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter discovered the Tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt. It had been undisturbed since 1337 BC.
1952 – The United States government establishes the National Security Agency.
2001 - The first movie based on the best-selling "Harry Potter" books by J.K. Rowling has its world premiere in London.
1605 - Guy Fawkes was arrested when around 30 barrels of gunpowder, camouflaged with coal, were discovered in the cellar under Parliament. Robert Catesby's small band of Catholic zealots who planned to blow up James I and Parliament were only arrested after Fawkes revealed their names when tortured on the rack. The 'Gunpowder Plot' is commemorated each year in Britain on 5th November.
1909 - Woolworths opened its first British store, in Liverpool. Almost 100 years later, (at the end of the first week in January 2009) the last remaining stores closed, for the last time.
1927 - Britain's first automatic traffic lights were installed at Princess Square road junction in Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands.
1935 - Parker Brothers launched the game Monopoly.
1991 - Millionaire publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell was found dead at sea, several hours after mysteriously disappearing from his yacht off the Canary Islands.
1994 - George Foreman became boxing's oldest heavyweight champion at age 45 by knocking out Michael Moorer in the 10th round of their WBA fight in Las Vegas.
2006 – Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq, and his co-defendants Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar are sentenced to death in the al-Dujail trial for the role in the massacre of the 148 Shi'as in 1982.
2007 – China's first lunar satellite, Chang'e 1 goes into orbit around the Moon.
1429 - Henry VI was crowned King of England.
1860 - Abraham Lincoln defeated three other candidates and became 16th President of the United States of America; he was the first Republican president.
1935 - The RAF's first monoplane fighter, the 'Hawker Hurricane' made its maiden flight.
1944 – Plutonium is first produced at the Hanford Atomic Facility and subsequently used in the Fat Man atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
1945 - The first jet landed on a carrier, the USS Wake Island.
1965 – Cuba and the United States formally agree to begin an airlift for Cubans who want to go to the United States. By 1971, 250,000 Cubans made use of this program.
1970 - Three times Grand National hero Red Rum, the greatest ever steeplechaser, won his first ever race, a novice event at Doncaster, at odds of 100/7.
1975 - UK punk rock group, the Sex Pistols, gave their first public performance at London's St Martin's College of Art. College authorities cut the concert short after a mere 10 minutes.
1988 - Six thousand U.S. Defense Department computers were crippled by a virus; the culprit was the 23-year-old son of the head of the country's computer security agency.
2002 - A jury in Beverly Hills convicted actress Winona Ryder of stealing $5,500 worth of merchandise from a Saks Fifth Avenue store.
1492 – The Ensisheim Meteorite, the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France.
1665 – The London Gazette, the oldest surviving journal, is first published.
1783 - The last public hanging in Britain took place when John Austin, a forger, was executed at Tyburn, near Marble Arch in London.
1872 – The ship Mary Celeste sails from New York, eventually to be found deserted.
1908 – Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are reportedly killed in San Vicente, Bolivia.
1917 - Russia's Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.
1929 - New York's Museum of Modern Art opened to the public.
1967 - British heavyweight champion Henry Cooper beat challenger Billy Walker to become the only boxer to win three Lonsdale Belts outright.
1974 - Lord Lucan mysteriously disappeared following the murder of his children's nanny and a serious assault on his wife.
1991 -Basketball star Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for the AIDS virus and was retiring.
1996 - A team of British, American and Australian scientists reported evidence that life on Earth originated some 350 million years earlier than previously believed.
1996 – NASA launches the Mars Global Surveyor.
2006 – Chicago O'Hare UFO sighting.
1745 – Charles Edward Stuart invades England with an army of 5000 that would later participate in the Battle of Culloden.
1793 - The Louvre opened as a museum in Paris, though only part of the collection could be viewed.
1895 - William Rontgen discovered X-rays during an experiment at the University of Wurzburg.
1920 - Rupert Bear made his first appearance in the Daily Express.
1957 - A report into a fire at Windscale nuclear power plant in Cumbria blamed the accident on human error, poor management and faulty instruments. The fire caused an unspecified amount of radioactive iodine vapour - iodine 131 - to escape into the atmosphere.
1965 – The Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965 is given Royal Assent, formally abolishing the death penalty in the United Kingdom.
1997 - Chinese engineers diverted the Yangtze River to make way for the Three Gorges Dam.
2004 – War in Iraq: More than 10,000 U.S. troops and a small number of Iraqi army units participate in a siege on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
2006 - Microsoft releases Windows Vista.