On this day

Me too, I'm enjoying learning something new each day
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1532 - The Incan empire fell to Spain, as Francisco Pizarro and his men capture Inca Emperor Atahualpa.

1824 - Australian explorer Hamilton Hume discovered the Murray River, the longest river in Australia.

1849 – A Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence is later commuted to hard labor.

1938 – LSD is first synthesized by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.

1945 – UNESCO is founded.

1965 – Venera program: the Soviet Union launches the Venera 3 space probe toward Venus, that will be the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet.

1969 - Lieutenant William Calley, Jr., faced a court martial for directing his platoon in the massacre of at least 400 unarmed peasants in the Vietnamese village of My Lai.

1973 – Skylab program: NASA launches Skylab 4 with a crew of three astronauts from Cape Canaveral, Florida for an 84-day mission.

2000 – Bill Clinton becomes the first U.S. President to visit Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War.

40 years ago today, the first page 3 girl appeared in the sun

1558 – Elizabethan era begins: Queen Mary I of England dies and is succeeded by her half-sister Elizabeth I of England.

1603 - The trial of Sir Walter Raleigh began. Falsely accused of treason, he had been offered a large sum of money by Lord Cobham, a critic of England's King James I, to make peace with the Spanish and put Arabella Stuart, James's cousin, on the throne. Raleigh claimed he turned down the offer, but Lord Cobham told his accusers that Raleigh was involved in the plot.

1855 – David Livingstone becomes the first European to see the Victoria Falls in what is now present-day Zambia-Zimbabwe.

1869 – In Egypt, the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea, is inaugurated.

1882 - The Royal Astronomer witnessed an unidentified flying object from the Greenwich Observatory.

1919 – King George V of the United Kingdom proclaims Armistice Day (later Remembrance Day). The idea is first suggested by Edward George Honey.

1947 – American scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain observe the basic principles of the transistor, a key element for the electronics revolution of the 20th Century.

1959 - Two Scottish airports, Prestwick and Renfrew, became the first to offer duty free goods in Britain. London Heathrow followed soon after.

1970 – Luna program: The Soviet Union lands Lunokhod 1 on Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) on the Moon. This is the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world and is released by the orbiting Luna 17 spacecraft.

2003 - Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in as the 38th governor of California.

1307 – William Tell shoots an apple off his son's head.

1477 - William Caxton set Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, the first book to be printed in England. Caxton went on to print almost 100 books in England, including the Canterbury Tales.

1793 – The Louvre is officially opened in Paris, France.

1852 - The state funeral of the Duke of Wellington took place at St Paul's Cathedral. It was one of the biggest ever held in London.

1883 - The United States and Canada adopted the 4-zone Standard Time system.

1916 - General Douglas Haig called off the first Battle of the Somme in Europe after five months. The battle included the first use of tanks. The Allied advance of just 125 square miles claimed 420,000 British and 195,000 French casualties. German losses were over 650,000.

1928 – Release of the animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. This is also considered by the Disney corporation to be Mickey's birthday.

1963 – The first push-button telephone goes into service.

1987 - The worst fire in the history of the London Underground killed 30 people. The blaze began in the machinery below a wooden escalator in King’s Cross Underground station and soon filled the tunnels with dense, choking smoke and intense heat.

1991 – Shiite Muslim kidnappers in Lebanon release Anglican Church envoys Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland.

2004 - Britain outlawed fox hunting with hounds in England and Wales.

1620 - The ship Mayflower arrived at Cape Cod, America. Its 87 passengers were members of a Protestant sect, known as The Pilgrim Fathers.

1794 – The United States and Great Britain sign Jay's Treaty, which attempts to resolve some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War.

1881 – A meteorite lands near the village of Grossliebenthal, southwest of Odessa, Ukraine.

1930 – Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow commit their first robbery, the first of a large series of robberies and other criminal acts.

1960 - The first VTOL (vertical take off and landing) aircraft made by the British Hawker Siddeley Company was flown for the first time.

1969 - Pele scored his 1000th goal.

1969 - U.S. astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr. and Alan Bean became the third and fourth humans to walk on the surface of the Moon after their landing module, Intrepid, touched down as part of the Apollo 12 mission.

1990 - The pop duo Milli Vanilli were stripped of their Grammy Award, other singers sung the duos songs.

1994 - Britain's first National Lottery draw took place. It had a jackpot of £7M and was shown live on BBC television.

1998 – Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of the Artist Without Beard sells at auction for $71.5 million.

868 - St. Edmund, Saxon king of East Anglia, was martyred by the Vikings, who tied him to a tree, shot at him with arrows, then beheaded him. His bodied is enshrined at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk.

1759 - The British fleet, under Admiral Hawke, defeated the French at the Battle of Quiberon Bay, thwarting an invasion of England.

1820 – An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman elton's 1851 novel Moby-Dick is in part inspired by this story).

1944 - World War II: The end of the 'blackout' in London. After five years in the dark, the lights were switched back on in Piccadilly Circus, the Strand and in Fleet Street.

1945 - The Nuremberg Trials began for 24 Nazis accused of war crimes and atrocities.

1974 – The United States Department of Justice files its final anti-trust suit against AT&T. This suit later leads to the break up of AT&T and its Bell System.

1984 – The SETI Institute is founded.

1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.

1998 – The first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched.

1843 - Thomas Hancock patented vulcanized rubber. In 1825 he had produced the first toy balloons in Britain, consisting of a bottle of rubber solution and a condensing syringe.

1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

1905 – Albert Einstein's paper, Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, is published in the journal Annalen der Physik. This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass. This leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc².

1918 - At the end of World War I, the German Fleet was surrendered to Britain at its northern naval base at Scapa Flow.

1929 - Surrealist painter Salvador Dali had his first exhibit.

1958 - Work began on the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland. It was the longest suspension bridge outside the United States and the fourth-largest in the world at the time of its construction. It was awarded Historic Scotland's Category A, listed structure status in 2001.

1980 - Approximately 83 million people tuned in to find out who shot J.R on the TV show Dallas.

2003 - An acoustic guitar on which the late Beatle George Harrison learned to play, fetched £276,000 at a London auction.

1718 – Off the coast of North Carolina, British pirate Edward Teach (known as Blackbeard) is killed in battle with a boarding party led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard.

1869 - The launch of the clipper Cutty Sark, one of the last clippers ever to be built and the only one still surviving to this day.

1906 - The SOS distress signal was adopted at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention.

1946 - The first Biro ballpoint pen went on sale, invented by Hungarian Laszlo Biro and manufactured by a British company.

1963 - President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. Lee Harvey Oswald, suspected of assassinating the president, was arrested.

1977 - The world's first supersonic airliner, Concorde, was given permission to fly into New York's Kennedy Airport following an agreement over noise levels.

1988 - The B-2 stealth bomber was revealed to the U.S Congress and the media.

1995 – Toy Story is released as the first feature length film created completely using computer generated imagery.

1889 – The first jukebox goes into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco.

1909 - The Wright brothers formed a corporation for the commercial manufacture of their airplanes.

1963 - The first episode of Dr. Who was screened in Britain. The first Dr. Who was played by William Hartnell, Ann Ford was his companion.

1980 – A series of earthquakes in southern Italy kills approximately 4,800 people.

1990 – The first all woman expedition to the south pole (3 Americans, 1 Japanese and 12 Russians), sets off from Antarctica on the 1st leg of a 70 day, 1287 kilometre ski trek.

2007 – MS Explorer, a cruise liner carrying 154 people, sinks in the Antarctic Ocean south of Argentina after hitting an iceberg near the South Shetland Islands. There were no fatalities.

1642 – Abel Tasman becomes the first European to discover the island Van Diemen's Land (later renamed Tasmania).

1835 – The Texas Provincial Government authorizes the creation of a horse-mounted police force called the Texas Rangers.

1859 - Charles Darwin published his controversial and groundbreaking scientific work 'The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection'.

1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald is murdered by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. The shooting is broadcast live on television.

1969 - Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the Moon, successfully returned to Earth.

1972 - One of only eight 1933 pennies minted was auctioned at Sotherbys for £7,000.

1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed "Lucy" (after The Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.

1977 - Greece announced the discovery of the tomb of King Philip II, father of Alexander the Great.

1991 - Freddie Mercury, English rock singer, died at the age of 45, just one day after he publicly announced that he was HIV positive.