1098 – Crusaders defeat Prince Redwan of Aleppo at Antioch
1355 – The St. Scholastica’s Day riot breaks out in Oxford, England, leaving 63 scholars and perhaps 30 locals dead in two days.
1749 – 10th (final) volume of Fielding’s “Tom Jones” is published
1774 – Andrew Becker demonstrates diving suit
1798 – Louis Alexandre Berthier invaded Rome, on February 15 proclaimed a Roman Republic and then on February 20 take Pope Pius VI as a prisoner.
1807 – US Coast Survey authorized by Congress
1855 – US citizenship laws amended all children of US parents born abroad granted US citizenship
1870 – YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) forms (NYC)
1879 – First electric arc light used in a California theater
1879 – Henry Morton Stanley departs to the Congo
1890 – Around 11 million acres, ceded to US by Sioux Indians opens for settlement
1897 – New York Times begins using slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print”
1906 – Britain’s first modern and largest battleship “HMS Dreadnought” launched
1933 – Delivery of first singing telegram
Western Union, began offering singing telegram services in 1933. George P. Oslin, the Western Union public relations director, decided this would be a good opportunity to make telegrams, which had been associated with deaths and other tragic news, into something more popular. By the 1960’s the telephone reduced the number of telegrams and by the 70’s they were no longer offered.
1935 – Pennsylvania RR begins passenger service on new electric locomotive
1949 – Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” opens at Morosco Theater, NYC
1954 – Eisenhower warns against US intervention in Vietnam
1962 – USSR swaps Francis Gary Power for Rudolph Abel
1973 – 83m wide gas tank on Staten Island explodes, 40 die
1982 – 28 skiers perform backflips while holding hands in Quebec
Here’s a link to 30 skiers doing a backflip!
1996 – IBM’s Deep Blue becomes the first computer to win a game of chess against a reigning chess champ, Gary Kasparov
Birthdays
1728 – Peter III Feodorovich, German/Russian czar of Russia (1761-62)
1880 – Jesse G Vincent, Arkansas, engineer designed first V-12 engine
1890 – Fanya Kaplan, failed assassin of Vladimir Lenin. (d. 1918)
Kaplan was a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries and saw Lenin as a ‘traitor to the revolution’, when his Bolsheviks purged the Tsars. On August 30, 1918, after Lenin spoke at the Hammer and Sickle, a factory in Moscow, as he left the building, Kaplan called out to him. When Lenin turned towards her, she fired three shots. Kaplan was taken into custody and made the following statement: “My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After the Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it.” Interrogated by the Cheka, she refused to name any accomplices, and was shot on 3 September.
1898 – Bertolt Brecht, Germany, playwright (Mother Courage)/composer
Weddings
1920 – Jozef Haller de Hallenburg performs symbolic wedding of Poland to the sea, celebrating restitution of Polish access to open sea.
Deaths
1923 – Wilhelm Rontgen, German physicist (Nobel 1901), dies at 77
1944 – Eugène Michel Antoniadi, Greek astronomer, a crater on Mars and the Antoniadi crater on the Moon were named in his honor (b. 1870)
1948 – Sergei Eisenstein, Russian director (Battleship Potemkin), dies at 50
1983 – Eduard Franz, actor (Zorro), dies at 80
2001 – Abraham Beame, Mayor of New York City (b. 1906)
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com and Google searches