46 BC – Julius Caesar fights Titus Labienus in the Battle of Ruspina.
1847 – Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the United States government.
1853 – After having been kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South, Solomon Northup regains his freedom; his memoir Twelve Years a Slave later becomes a national bestseller.
1865 – The New York Stock Exchange opens its first permanent headquarters near Wall Street.
1903 – Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The Edison film company shoots the film electrocuting Topsy.
Here’s a sad link to Topsy’s electrocution. The ‘trainer’ who burned her trunk with a lit cigar should have been fired, or electrocuted.
1958 – Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from orbit.
1959 – Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.
1974 – President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over materials subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
1998 – A massive ice storm hits eastern Canada and the northeastern United States, continuing through January 10 and causing widespread destruction.
2004 – Spirit, a NASA Mars rover, lands successfully on Mars at 04:35 UTC.
Births
1643 – Isaac Newton, English mathematician and physicist (d. 1727)
1809 – Louis Braille, French educator, invented Braille (d. 1852)
1900 – James Bond, American ornithologist and zoologist (d. 1989)
1935 – Floyd Patterson, American boxer (d. 2006)
Deaths
1877 – Cornelius Vanderbilt, American businessman (b. 1794) At the time of his death he was reportedly the richest man in the world.
1882 – John William Draper, English-American physician, chemist, and photographer (b. 1811)
1960 – Albert Camus, French novelist, philosopher, and journalist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1913)
1965 – T. S. Eliot, American-English poet, playwright, and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1888)
1990 – Harold Edgerton, American engineer and academic (b. 1903)
2012 – Eve Arnold, American photographer and journalist (b. 1912)
