1770 – James Bruce discovers what he believes to be the source of the Nile.
1851 – Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville is published in the USA. Born at #6 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, the third child of a merchant in French dry goods. Within a few years, his father Allan Melvill moved his wife and three children to 55 Cortlandt Street, staffed with a cook, nurse, houseman, and later a governess. Melville’s formal education ended abruptly after his father died in 1832, leaving the family in financial straits. Melville briefly became a schoolteacher before he took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship. He became an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. His best known works include Typee, a romantic account of his experiences in Polynesian life, and his whaling novel Moby-Dick
1889 – Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in 72 days.
1910 – Aviator Eugene Burton Ely performs the first takeoff from a ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He took off from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in a Curtiss pusher.
1914 – The Ottoman Empire declares war against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro during the early months of World War I.
1940 – World War II: In England, Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed.
1957 – The “Apalachin Meeting” in rural Tioga County in upstate New York is raided by law enforcement; many high level Mafia figures are arrested while trying to flee.
1960 – Ruby Bridges becomes the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in Louisiana.Ruby Nell Bridges Hall is an American activist known for being the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.
1969 – Apollo program: Launched on November 14th, Apollo 12 was a mission that lasted ten days following the triumphant voyage of Apollo 11 a few months earlier. Their mission had several objectives…to perform a survey of the landing site and to collect geological samples. They landed near the unmanned Surveyor III which landed on April 20, 1967, at the Mare Cognitum portion of the Oceanus and collected a few parts from it to take back to earth for study.
This second landing mission also included getting a better understanding of work in the lunar envirnment and developing further techniques for proper landing on the moon’s surface. The crew consisted of Mission commander Charles “Pete” Conrad, Lunar Module Pilot Alan L. Bean and Command Module Pilot Richard F. Gordon who remained in lunar orbit. for just over one day and seven hours
Some of the experiments included
• The Soil Mechanics Investigation which studied the properties of the lunar soil.
• The Solar Wind Composition Experiment collected samples of the solar wind for analysis on Earth.
Other experiments were deployed by the crew and then monitored from Earth by radio telemetry after the crew departed. This group of experiments was termed the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP). Some of these experiments continued to return data until September 1977, when the entire ALSEP network was turned off due to lack of funding for the ground support team
• The Passive Seismic Experiment detected lunar “moonquakes” and provided information about the internal structure of the Moon.
• The Lunar Surface Magnetometer measured the strength of the Moon’s magnetic field.
• The Cold Cathode Gauge measured the abundance of gases in the lunar atmosphere.
• The Suprathermal Ion Detector Experiment studied the lunar ionosphere.
• The Solar Wind Spectrometer measured the composition of the solar wind.
• The Lunar Dust Detector studied the effects of lunar dust on the operation of the experiment package.
1979 – Iran hostage crisis: US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1991 – American and British authorities announce indictments against two Libyan intelligence officials in connection with the downing of the Pan Am Flight 103.
2010 – Germany’s Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull Racing wins Formula One’s Drivers Championship to become the sport’s youngest champion.
Births
1765 – Robert Fulton, American engineer, invented the steamboat (d. 1815)
1840 – Claude Monet, French painter (d. 1926)
1889 – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian lawyer and politician, 1st Prime Minister of India (d. 1964)
1908 – Joseph McCarthy, American captain, lawyer, and politician (d. 1957)
1922 – Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egyptian politician and diplomat, 6th Secretary General of the United Nations (d. 2016)
1947 – P. J. O’Rourke, American political satirist and journalist
1947 – Buckwheat Zydeco, American accordion player (d. 2016)
Stanley Dural, Jr., better known by his stage name Buckwheat Zydeco, was an American accordionist and zydeco musician. He was one of the few zydeco artists to achieve mainstream success
1948 – Charles, Prince of Wales
1954 – Condoleezza Rice, American political scientist, academic, and politician, 66th United States Secretary of State
Deaths
1864 – Franz Müller, German tailor and murderer (b. 1840)
1915 – Booker T. Washington, American educator, essayist and historian (b. 1856)