607 – 12th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet
1519 – Cortez lands in Mexico
1639 – Cambridge College renamed Harvard for clergyman John Harvard
1677 – Massachusetts gains title to Maine for $6,000
1759 – 27th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet
1781 – Sir William Herschel sees “comet” which turned out to be the planet Uranus
1865 – Jefferson Davis signs bill authorizing use of slaves as soldiers
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| The Blizzard of 1888 |
1888 – Great Blizzard of 1888 rages
1900 – In France the length of the workday for women and children is limited to 11 hours by law
1925 – Tennessee makes it unlawful to teach evolution
1930 – Clyde Tombaugh announces discovery of Pluto
1935 – Driving tests introduced in Great Britain
1980 – Ford Motor Co found innocent in death of 3 women in a fiery Pinto The Ford Pinto went on sale on September 11, 1970. Controversy followed the Pinto after allegations that the Pinto’s structural design allowed its fuel tank filler neck to break off and the fuel tank to be punctured in a rear-end collision, resulting in deadly fires from spilled fuel. A lawsuit was won in 1978 over the matter and the car was recalled the same year.
1985 – Funeral services held for Konstantin Chernenko in Moscow
1986 – Microsoft has its Initial Public Offering
“If you had the good fortune to have bought 100 shares at the $21 offering price that day and sat on the investment for 25 years, it would have mushroomed into 28,800 shares over the course of nine stock splits and be worth about three quarters of a million dollars today.” (Network World)
1991 – Exxon pays $1-billion dollars in fines and cleanup of Valdez oil spill. It was on March 24, 1989, that the Exxon Valdez ploughed into rocks in Prince William Sound in Alaska spilling at least 11 million gallons of oil
1993 – Blizzard of ’93 hits the northeastern US seaboard
2003 – Human evolution: The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy
2012 – Encyclopaedia Britannica announces that it will no longer publish printed versions of its encyclopaedia
2013 – Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio is elected as the new pope, taking the papal name Pope Francis
Births
1855 – Percival “Percy” Lowell, US astronomer who predicted the discovery of Pluto ( see above, 1930)
1913 – William J Casey, headed CIA during Iran-contra scandal (1981-87).
1939 – Neil Sedaka, Brooklyn New York, American singer/songwriter
Anniversaries
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| Pablo and Jacqueline |
1961 – Pablo Picasso (79) marries his model Jacqueline Rocque (37)
Deaths
1842 – Henry Shrapnel, British soldier and inventor (b. 1761)We have him to blame for an invention of what he called “spherical case” ammunition: a hollow cannonball filled with lead shot that burst in mid-air.
1938 – Clarence S Darrow, Scopes Monkey Trial attorney, dies in Chicago at 80
1964 – Kitty Genovese, stabbed to death in Queens; 40 neighbors heard her screams but did not call for help