1796 – Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, discovers the construction of the heptadecagon
1842 – Ether used as an anesthetic for the first time by Dr. Crawford Long of Georgia
1858 – Pencil with attached eraser patent granted to Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia
1867 – The United States buys Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000, or 2 cents an acre
1909 – Queensboro Bridge, a double-decked Cantilever bridge, opens linking Manhattan and Queens
1919 – Gandhi announces resistance against Rowlatt Act
1950 – Phototransistor invention announced in Murray Hill, New Jersey, although the light-sensitive transistors were invented two years earlier by Dr. John N. Shive, who is more famous for his invention of the wave generator
1961 – The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs is signed at New York. The treaty updates the Paris Convention, signed on July 13, 1931, to include the prohibition of the production of specific drugs, many of which were narcotics, specifically synthetic opioids invented in the thirty years after the Paris Convention of 1931. As of early 2015, the Single Convention had 185 state parties.
1972 – Northern Ireland’s Government and Parliament dissolved by the British Government and ‘direct rule’ from Westminster is introduced
1981 – President Reagan is shot and wounded by John W Hinckley III
1982 – The Columbia Space Shuttle lands at White Sands, New Mexico, after completing its third mission for NASA which lasted eight days. It is the only mission to land at the White Sands Space Harbor, and was originally scheduled to land at the Edwards Air Force Base but could not due to flooding.
1983 – New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) begins trading in crude oil future
1996 – Mets beat Yankees 5-3 in an exhibition game
2012 – MasterCard and Visa announce a massive breach in security with over ten million compromised credit card numbers
Birthdays
1697 – John-Baptist Xavery, Flemish sculptor
1853 – Vincent van Gogh, Groot-Zundert, Netherlands, artist, painter and pioneer of Expressionism
1857 – Leon Charles Thevenin, French telegraph engineer
Deaths
1783 – William Hunter, Scottish anatomist
1896 – Charilaos Trikoupis, seven times prime minister of Greece
2002 – Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother of the United Kingdom, mother of Queen Elizabeth II and wife of King George VI, dies at 101. She was the last Empress of India and was a great asset to British interests, which is proven by Adolf Hitler describing her as “the most dangerous woman in Europe”.