Today in History
November 14
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1889 – New York World reporter Nellie Bly aka Elizabeth Cochran, began her attempt to surpass fictitious journey of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg by traveling around world in less than 80 days She succeeded, finishing the trip in 72 days and 6 hours
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1380 – King Charles VI of France crowned at age 12
1524 – Francisco Pizarro begins his first great expedition, near Colombia
1666 – Samuel Pepys reports on first blood transfusion. It was between dogs.
1680 – Gottfried Kirch discovers the Great Comet of 1680 (Kirch’s Comet/Newton’s Comet)
1698 – Spanish king Carlos appoints grandson prince Jozef Ferdinand as heir
1770 – James Bruce discovers what he believes to be the source of the Nile.
1832 – First horse-drawn street car debuts in NYC; fare 12 cents rode on 4th Avenue between Prince and 14th Sts
1851 – Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, is published in the USA.
1886 – Friedrich Soennecken first developed the hole puncher, a type of office tool capable of punching small holes in paper.
1889 – New York World reporter Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) began her attempt to surpass fictitious journey of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg by traveling around world in less than 80 days She succeeded, finishing the trip in 72 days and 6 hours
1935 – Nazis deprive German Jews of their citizenship
1940 – World War II: In England, Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed.
1960 – Ruby Bridges becomes the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in Louisiana.
1965 – US government sends 90,000 soldiers to Vietnam
1969 – Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12, the second crewed mission to the surface of the Moon.
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Claude Monet
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1971 – Mariner 9 enters orbit around Mars.
1979 – Iran hostage crisis: President Jimmy Carterissues Executive order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1982 – Lech Wałęsa, the leader of Poland’s outlawed Solidarity movement, is released after eleven months of internment near the Soviet border.
2001 – War in Afghanistan: Afghan Northern Alliance fighters take over the capital Kabul.
2001 – A magnitude 7.8 earthquake strikes a remote part of the Tibetan plateau. It had the longest known surface rupture recorded on land (~400 km) and is the best documented example of a supershear earthquake.
2008 – The first G-20 economic summit opens in Washington, D.C.
Births
1650 – William III of England, Prince of Orange, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (d. 1702)
1765 – Robert Fulton, American engineer, Early steamboat pioneer (d. 1815)
1805 – Fanny Mendelssohn, German pianist and composer (d. 1847)
1840 – Claude Monet, French painter (d. 1926)
1889 – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian lawyer and politician, 1st Prime Minister of India (d. 1964)
1922 – Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Egyptian politician and diplomat, 6th Secretary General of the United Nations (d. 2016)
1947 – Buckwheat Zydeco, American accordion player (d. 2016)
1954 – Condoleezza Rice, American political scientist, academic, and politician, 66th United States Secretary of State
Deaths
565 – Justinian I, Byzantine emperor (b. 482)
1844 – John Abercrombie, Scottish physician and philosopher (b. 1780)
2016 – Gwen Ifill, American television journalist (b. 1955)