475 – Byzantine Emperor Zeno is forced to flee his capital at Constantinople, and his general, Basiliscus gains control of the empire.
1150 – Wanyan Liang and other court officials murder Emperor Xizong of Jin. Wanyan Liang succeeds him as emperor.
1349 – The Jewish population of Basel, believed by the residents to be the cause of the ongoing Black Death, is rounded up and incinerated.
The Basel massacre of Jews took place as part of the Black Death persecutions of 1348-1350. Following the spread of the Black Death through the surrounding countryside of Savoy and subsequently Basel, the Jews were accused of having poisoned the wells, because they suffered a lower mortality rate than the local gentiles from the pestilence. The City Fathers of Basel attempted to protect their Jews but to no avail: the local guilds demanded their blood and 600 were handed over. They were shackled inside a wooden barn on an island in the Rhine, which was set afire. The few survivors-young orphans-were forcibly converted to Catholicism. Following the massacre, it was decreed that all Jews were banned from settling in the city of Basel for 200 years, although this was revoked several decades later. (wikipedia)
1431 – Judges’ investigations for the trial of Joan of Arc begin in Rouen.
1793 – Jean-Pierre Blanchard becomes the first person to fly in a balloon in the United States.
1806 – Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson receives a state funeral and is interred in St Paul’s Cathedral.
1816 – Sir Humphry Davy tests his safety lamp for miners at Hebburn Colliery. It was a safety lamp for use in flammable atmospheres, and consists of a wick lamp with the flame enclosed inside a mesh screen. It was created for use in coal mines, to reduce the danger of explosions due to the presence of methane and other flammable gases.
1839 – The French Academy of Sciences announces the Daguerreotype photography process.
1858 – Anson Jones, the last President of the Republic of Texas, commits suicide.
1909 – Ernest Shackleton, leading the Nimrod Expedition to the South Pole, plants the British flag 97 nautical miles from the South Pole, the farthest anyone had ever reached at that time.
1923 – Juan de la Cierva makes the first autogyro flight.
Invented by the Spanish engineer Juan de la Cierva to create an aircraft that could fly safely at low speeds, the autogyro was first flown on 9 January 1923, at Cuatro Vientos Airfield in Madrid.
1960 – President of Egypt Gamal Abdel Nasser opens construction on the Aswan Dam by detonating ten tons of dynamite to demolish twenty tons of granite on the east bank of the Nile.
2007 – Steve Jobs introduces the original iPhone at a Macworld keynote in San Francisco.
2015 – The perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris two days earlier are both killed after a hostage situation; a second hostage situation, related to the Charlie Hebdo shooting, occurs at a Jewish market in Vincennes.
Births
1606 – William Dugard, English printer (d. 1662)
1854 – Lady Randolph Churchill, American-born wife of Lord Randolph Churchill, mother of Sir Winston Churchill (d. 1921)
1870 – Joseph Strauss, co-designed the Golden Gate Bridge (d. 1938)
1875 – Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, American sculptor and art collector, founded the Whitney Museum of American Art (d. 1942)
1902 – Rudolf Bing, American impresario and General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City from 1950 to 1972. (d. 1997)
1902 – Josemaría Escrivá, Spanish priest and saint, founded Opus Dei (d. 1975)
1913 – Richard Nixon, 37th President of the United States (d. 1994)
1919 – William Morris Meredith, Jr., poet and academic (d. 2007)
1941 – Joan Baez, American singer-songwriter, guitarist and activist
Deaths
1283 – Wen Tianxiang, Chinese general and scholar (b. 1236)
1514 – Anne of Brittany, queen of Charles VIII of France and Louis XII of France (b. 1477)
1848 – Caroline Herschel, German-English astronomer (b. 1750)
1939 – Johann Strauss III, was an Austrian composer whose father was Eduard Strauss, whose uncles were Johann Strauss II and Josef Strauss, and whose grandfather was Johann Strauss I. Born in 1866.