1560 Jan Gruter (born), Dutch critic and scholar (died 1627)
1842 Charles Alfred Pillsbury (born), American businessman, founded the Pillsbury Company (died 1899)
1888 Carl Zeiss (died), German lens maker (born 1816)
1894 Robert Louis Stevenson (died), Scottish author and poet (born 1850)
1895 Anna Freud (born), Austrian-English psychoanalyst (died 1982)
1901 US President Theodore Roosevelt delivers a 20,000-word speech to the House of Representatives asking the Congress to curb the power of trusts “within reasonable limits”.
1910 Modern neon lighting is first demonstrated by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor Show.
1927 Andy Williams (born), American singer and actor (died 2012)
1927 Putting Pants on Philip, the first Laurel and Hardy film, is released.
1943 J. Philippe Rushton (born), Canadian academic and theorist (died 2012)
1948 Ozzy Osbourne (born), English singer-songwriter and actor (Black Sabbath)
1953 Franz Klammer (born), Austrian skier
1960 The musical Camelot debuted at the Majestic Theatre on Broadway, and would become associated with the Kennedy administration.
1963 Terri Schiavo, American right to die patient (died 2005)
1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement: Police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents’ decision to forbid protests on UC property.
1967 At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, a transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).
1973 Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.
1976 An assassination attempt is made on Bob Marley. He is shot twice, but plays a concert two days later.
1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini becomes the first Supreme Leader of Iran.
1979 In Cincinnati, Ohio, 11 fans are suffocated in a crush for seats on the concourse outside Riverfront Coliseum before a Who concert.
1981 Walter Knott (died), American farmer, founded Knott’s Berry Farm (born 1889)
1982 A soil sample is taken from Times Beach, Missouri that will be found to contain 300 times the safe level of dioxin.
1984 A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
1989 In a meeting off the coast of Malta, US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev release statements indicating that the cold war between NATO and The Soviet Union may be coming to an end.
1992 A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world’s first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.
1993 Lewis Thomas (died), American physician (born 1913)
1997 In Ottawa, Canada, representatives from 121 countries sign The Ottawa treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines. The United States, People’s Republic of China, and Russia do not sign the treaty, howeve
EO Smith
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