558 – In Constantinople, the dome of the Hagia Sophia collapses. Justinian I immediately orders the dome rebuilt.
1664 – Louis XIV of France inaugurates The Palace of Versailles.
1697 – Stockholm’s royal castle (dating back to medieval times) is destroyed by fire (in the 18th century, it is replaced by the current Royal Palace).
1789 – First inaugural ball for George Washington held in Lower Manhattan
1824 – Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, premieres in Vienna
1888 – George Eastman patents “Kodak box camera”
1912 – Columbia University approves plans for awarding the Pulitzer Prize in several categories
1915 – Lusitania sunk by German submarine; 1198 lives lost
The RMS Lusitania was launched by Cunard in 1907 to compete with the German and Dutch transatlantic passage business to the New World.
For a short time she was the world’s largest ship and holder of the Blue Riband as she had revolutionary turbine engines and quad screws that allowed a cruising speed of 25 knots. She departed New York on May 1 1915, after the German Embassy ran newspaper ads advising people not to sail on the Lusitania as Germany considered the waters around Great Britain in the war zone. It was in the afternoon of May 7th that German UBoat U20 torpedoed her and Lusitania sank in 300 feet of water in about 18 minutes. 1198 people perished 761 survived.
1943 – Dutch men 18-35 obliged to report to labor camps
1952 – The concept of the integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers, is first published by Geoffrey W.A. Dummer.
1960 – USSR announces Francis Gary Powers confessed to being a spy
1982 – IBM releases PC-DOS version 1.1
1998 – Mercedes-Benz buys Chrysler for $40 billion and forms DaimlerChrysler in the largest industrial merger in history.
2012 – Vladimir Putin sworn in for third six year term as President of Russia
2013 – 55 people are killed by a Boko Haram attack in Nigeria
Birthdays
1826 – Varina Howell Davis, First lady of the Confederacy, died in 1905
1840 – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russia, composer (1812 Overture, Swan Lake), (d. 1893)
1909 – Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid
Deaths
973 – Otto I the Great, Holy Roman Emperor (962-973), dies at 60
1166 – Willem I, the Bad, king of Sicily (1154-66)
1825 – Antonio Salieri, Italian composer, dies in Vienna at 74
1915 – Alfred G Vanderbilt, dies aboard Lusitania
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com Wikipedia and other internet searches