1066 - The death of Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England. He was called 'the Confessor' because of his great piety. His death led to the Norman Conquest.
1757 – Louis XV of France survives an assassination attempt by Robert–François Damiens, the last person to be executed in France by drawing and quartering, the traditional and gruesome form of capital punishment used for regicides.
1914 - Henry Ford announced that he would pay a minimum wage of $5 a day and would share with employees $10 million in the previous year's profits.
1922 - Sir Ernest Shackleton, British Antarctic explorer, died off South Georgia. It was his fourth expedition, aimed at circumnavigating the Antarctic.
1933 – Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge begins in San Francisco Bay.
1940 – FM radio is demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission for the first time.
1972 – U.S. President Richard Nixon orders the development of a space shuttle program.
2001 - A report funded by The Department of Health found that the convicted serial killer, former GP Harold Shipman, may have killed in excess of 300 of his patients.
2005 – Eris, the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system, is discovered by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz using images originally taken on October 21, 2003, at the Palomar Observatory.
1066 - The coronation of Harold II, as King of England, succeeding Edward the Confessor. He reigned for ten months before he died at the Battle of Hastings.
1540 - England's King Henry VIII married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, the marriage lasted 6 months.
1916 - World War I - The British Government introduced conscription, to replace the many thousands killed in the trenches in France.
1928 - Four people were drowned, and many paintings in the basement of the Tate Gallery were severely damaged, when the Thames flooded. The water was deep enough to fill the moat of the Tower of London.
1929 – Mother Teresa arrives in Calcutta to begin her work among India's poorest and sick people.
1938 - The 82-year-old Sigmund Freud, the pioneer of psychoanalysis, arrived in London from Vienna with several of his students, to escape the persecution of Jews.
1987 - The first episode of TV's Inspector Morse was broadcast. It was based in Oxford.
1987 - Astronomers reported sighting a new galaxy 12 billion light years away.
1995 – A chemical fire in an apartment complex in Manila, Philippines, leads to the discovery of plans for Project Bojinka, a mass-terrorist attack.
1536 - Catherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII of England and mother of Mary I, died.
1610 - Astronomer Galileo Galilei sighted four of Jupiter's moons, naming them Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.
1785 – Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
1789 - The first U.S. presidential election was held. Americans voted for electors who, a month later, chose George Washington to be the nation's first President.
1904 - The CQD distress signal was introduced. CQ stood for ‘seek you’, and the D for ‘danger’. It lasted just two years before being replaced with SOS.
1927 - A telephone service began operating between London and New York. A three-minute call cost £15.
1948 – Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.
1952 – President Harry Truman announces that the United States has developed the hydrogen bomb.
1975 - OPEC decided to raise crude oil prices by 10%, which began a tidal wave of world economic inflation.
1985 – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake, Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.
1558 : Calais, the last English possession on the mainland of France was regained by the French
1844 : Saint Bernadette of Lourdes (Marie-Bernarde Soubirous) was born. She claimed to see a vision of the virgin Mary at a spring
1989 : Emperor Hirohito of Japan died, aged 87. He had reigned for over 62 years
1990 : The leaning tower of Pisa was closed to the public for the first time in 807 years, so work could begin to stop it leaning any further
1800 - London opened its first soup kitchens for the poor.
1815 - Britain lost the last battle it ever fought against the US in the War of 1812. General Sir Edward Pakenham and his men were defeated at New Orleans.
1838 – Alfred Vail demonstrates a telegraph system using dots and dashes (this is the forerunner of Morse code).
1851 - Jean Foucault demonstrated definitively that the Earth rotates on its axis.
1877 – Crazy Horse and his warriors fight their last battle against the United States Cavalry at Wolf Mountain, Montana Territory.
1889 - American inventor Herman Hollerith patented his tabulator, the first device for data processing; his firm would later become one of IBM's founding companies.
1921 - David Lloyd George became the first Prime Minister to reside in Chequers, a country mansion in Buckinghamshire which had been given by Lord Lee of Fareham as a gift to the nation.
1963 – Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is exhibited in the United States for the first time, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
2004 – The RMS Queen Mary 2, the largest passenger ship ever built, is christened by her namesake's granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II.
1642 Astronomer Galileo Galilei died in Arcetri, Italy.
1815 U.S. forces led by Gen. Andrew Jackson defeated the British in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.
1935 Rock 'n' roll singer Elvis Presley was born in Tupelo, Miss.
1959 Charles De Gaulle was inaugurated as president of France's Fifth Republic.
1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty.
1973 Secret peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam resumed near Paris.
1976 Chinese premier Chou En-lai died at age 78.
1982 AT&T settled the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against it by agreeing to divest itself of the 22 Bell System companies.
1987 The Dow Jones industrial average closed above 2,000 for the first time, ending the day at 2,002.25.
1996 Former French president Francois Mitterrand died at age 79.
1998 Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was sentenced in New York to life in prison.
2007 A Moroccan man convicted of aiding three of the four pilots who committed the 9/11 attacks was sentenced by a German court to the maximum 15 years in prison.
2008 U.S. Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan, the only officer charged in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, was cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
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Current Birthdays
Stephen Hawking turns 69 years old today.
AP Photo/Evan Agostini Physicist Stephen Hawking turns 69 years old today.
88 Larry Storch
Actor ("F Troop")
83 Sander Vanocur
Broadcast journalist
78 Charles Osgood
Broadcast journalist
74 Shirley Bassey
Singer
73 Bob Eubanks
Game show host ("The Newlywed Game")
69 Bob Taft
Former governor of Ohio
65 Robby Krieger
Rock musician (The Doors)
64 David Bowie
Rock singer
58 Bruce Sutter
Baseball Hall of Famer
44 R. Kelly
R&B singer
38 Sean Paul
Reggae singer
32 Sarah Polley
Actress, director
Historic Birthdays
1793 - Jean-Pierre-Francois Blanchard made the first manned free-balloon flight in America, at Philadelphia, watched by President George Washington.
1799 - Income tax was introduced into Britain by William Pitt the Younger, to raise funds for the Napoleonic War. The rate was two shillings in the pound.
1806 - Lord Nelson, naval commander and hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, was buried beneath the dome of St Paul's cathedral, in London, after a grand and solemn procession along the river to Whitehall and thence to the City.
1854 - The first free lending Library opened, on Marylebone Road, London.
1905 – According to the Julian Calendar (which is used at the time), Russian workers stage a march on the Winter Palace that ends in the massacre by Tsarist troops known as Bloody Sunday, setting off the Russian Revolution of 1905.
1909 – Ernest Shackleton, leading the Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, plants the British flag 97 nautical miles (180 km; 112 mi) from the South Pole, the furthest anyone had ever reached at that time.
1929 - Alexander Fleming successfully treated his assistant Stuart Craddick’s infection with a penicillin broth, at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington.
1951 - The United Nations headquarters opened in New York City.
1972 - The Queen Elizabeth, the liner that had been turned into a sailing university, caught fire and sank in Hong Kong harbour. She had been the world’s largest passenger liner for over thirty years.
49 BC – Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, signaling the start of civil war.
1810 – Napoleon divorces his first wife Joséphine.
1839 - Indian tea was auctioned in Britain for the first time. Previously, only China tea had been available, at great expense. After the introduction of Indian tea, prices fell and tea became so affordable that it was soon the national drink.
1863 – The London Underground, the world's oldest underground railway, opens between London Paddington station and Farringdon station. The trains ran every fifteen minutes.
1918 - The House of Lords gave its approval to the Representation of the People Bill, which gave woman over the age of 30 the right to vote.
1922 - Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin and one of the architects of the 1921 peace treaty with Britain, was elected president of the newly established Irish Free State.
1946 – The United States Army Signal Corps successfully conducts Project Diana, bouncing radio waves off the moon and receiving the reflected signals.
1949 - Vinyl records were launched by RCA (45 rpm) and Columbia (33.3 rpm).
1962 – Apollo Project: NASA announces plans to build the C-5 rocket booster. It became better known as the Saturn V moon rocket, which launched every Apollo moon mission.
1985 - The C5 electric car with a top speed of 15 mph was demonstrated by its inventor, Sir Clive Sinclair.
2000 - America Online agreed to buy Time-Warner for $162 billion, making it the largest corporate merger to date.
630 – Prophet of Islam Muhammad leads an army of 10,000 Muslims to conquer Mecca.
1693 – Mt. Etna erupts in Sicily, Italy. A powerful earthquake destroys parts of Sicily and Malta.
1922 - Leonard Thompson was the first person to be successfully treated with insulin, at Toronto General Hospital.
1935 - Aviator Amelia Earhart began a trip from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California, that made her the first woman to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean.
1954 - All Comet airliners were grounded. The day before, 35 people had died in a mysterious crash off the island of Elba. Another Comet had crashed inexplicably near Calcutta in 1953 when it fell out of the sky for no apparent reason. The cause was finally traced to a structural fault, with serious consequences for British aviation.
1964 – United States Surgeon General Dr. Luther Leonidas Terry, M.D., publishes a landmark report saying that smoking may be hazardous to health, sparking nation- and worldwide anti-smoking efforts.
1984 - French farmers hijacked British lorries in a dispute against meat imports.
1993 - British Airways was forced into an embarrassing climb-down in relation to a campaign of 'dirty tricks' it launched against rival airline Virgin Atlantic. BA was forced to pay damages to both Virgin Atlantic and its boss Richard Branson.
1996 – Space Shuttle program: STS-72 launches from the Kennedy Space Center marking the start of the 74th Space Shuttle mission and the 10th flight of Endeavour.
2007 – China conducts the first successful anti-satellite missile test of any nation since 1985.
1866 - The Aeronautical Society of Great Britain was formed in London.
1879 - The British-Zulu War began.
1895 - The National Trust was founded by three Victorian philanthropists - Miss Octavia Hill, Sir Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley.
1967 – Dr. James Bedford becomes the first person to be cryonically preserved with intent of future resuscitation.
1970 - The Boeing 747 completed its first transatlantic flight, from New York to Heathrow.
1976 - Crime writer Dame Agatha Christie died, leaving a rumoured multi-million pound fortune and a final book waiting to be published.
2004 – The world's largest ocean liner, RMS Queen Mary 2, makes its maiden voyage.
2010 – The 2010 Haiti earthquake occurs killing at least 230,000 and destroying the majority of the capital Port-au-Prince.