1620 – Plymouth Colony settlers sign the Mayflower Compact
1783 – In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight.
1861 – American Civil War: Confederate President Jefferson Davis appoints Judah Benjamin secretary of war.
1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.
1905 – Albert Einstein’s paper, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, is published in the journal Annalen der Physik. This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass. This leads to the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc².
1920 – Irish War of Independence: In Dublin, 31 people are killed in what became known as “Bloody Sunday”. This included fourteen British informants, fourteen Irish civilians and three Irish Republican Army prisoners.
1922 – Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia takes the oath of office, becoming the first female United States Senator.
1942 – The completion of the Alaska Highway is celebrated (however, the highway is not usable by general vehicles until 1943).
1953 – The Natural History Museum, London announces that the “Piltdown Man” skull is a paleoanthropological hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilized remains of a previously unknown early human became known as the Piltdown Man. In 1912 amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson claimed he had discovered the “missing link” between ape and man, until it was conclusively exposed in 1953 as a forgery. It was found to have consisted of the altered mandible and some teeth of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed, though small-brained, modern human.
1964 – The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opens to traffic.
1969 – The first permanent ARPANET link is established between UCLA and SRI.
1985 – United States Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard is arrested for spying after being caught giving Israel classified information on Arab nations.
1986 – Iran-Contra affair: National Security Council member Oliver North and his secretary start to shred documents allegedly implicating them in the sale of weapons to Iran and channeling the proceeds to help fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
2004 – The Paris Club agrees to write off 80% (up to $100 billion) of Iraq’s external debt.
2015 – The government of Belgium imposed a security lockdown on Brussels, including the closure of shops, schools, public transportation, due to information about potential terrorist attacks.
Births
1694 – Voltaire, French historian, playwright, and philosopher (d. 1778)
1787 – Samuel Cunard, Canadian businessman, founded the Cunard Line (d. 1865)
1902 – Isaac Bashevis Singer, Polish-American author and playwright, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1991)
1944 – Earl Monroe, American basketball player
1953 – Tina Brown, English-American journalist and author
Deaths
1361 – Philip I, Duke of Burgundy (b. 1346)
1695 – Henry Purcell, English organist and composer (b. 1659)
1945 – Robert Benchley, American humorist, newspaper columnist, and actor (b. 1889)
1994 – Willem Jacob Luyten, Dutch-American astronomer and academic (b. 1899)
2005 – Hugh Sidey, American journalist and academic (b. 1927)