EVENTS:
- 1699 – Khalsa: The Sikh religion was formalised as the Khalsa – the brotherhood of Warrior-Saints – by Guru Gobind Singh in northern India, in accordance with the Nanakshahi calendar.
- 1828 – Noah Webster copyrights the first edition of his dictionary.
- 1890 – The Pan-American Union is founded by the First International Conference of American States in Washington, D.C.
- 1894 – The first ever commercial motion picture house opened in New York City using ten Kinetoscopes, a device for peep-show viewing of films.
- 1906 – The Azusa Street Revival opens and will launch Pentecostalism as a worldwide movement.
- 1927 – The first Volvo car premieres in Gothenburg, Sweden.
- 1928 – The Bremen, a German Junkers W33 type aircraft, reaches Greenly Island, Canada – the first successful transatlantic aeroplane flight from east to west.
- 1931 – First edition of The Highway Code published in Great Britain.
- 1956 – In Chicago, videotape is first demonstrated.
- 1958 – The Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 falls from orbit after a mission duration of 162 days.
- 1958 – The Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 falls from orbit after a mission duration of 162 days. This was the first spacecraft to carry a living animal, a dog named Laika. The female dog likely lived only a few hours.
- 1981 – STS-1: The first operational Space Shuttle, Columbia completes its first test flight.
- 1986 – The heaviest hailstones ever recorded (1 kilogram (2.2 lb)) fall on the Gopalganj district of Bangladesh, killing 92.
- 2003 – The Human Genome Project is completed with 99% of the human genome sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99%.
- 2005 – The Oregon Supreme Court nullifies marriage licenses issued to gay couples a year earlier by Multnomah County.
- 2010 – Nearly 2,700 are killed in a magnitude 6.9 earthquake in Yushu, Qinghai, China.
- 2014 – Twin bomb blasts in Abuja, Nigeria, kill at least 75 people and injures 141 others.
- 2014 – Two hundred seventy-six schoolgirls are abducted by Boko Haram in Chibok, Northeastern Nigeria.
- 2016 – In Japan, the foreshock of Kumamoto earthquakes occurs.
- 2022 – Russian invasion of Ukraine: The Russian warship Moskva sinks.
- 2023 – The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is launched by the European Space Agency.
- 2024 – Flooding in the Persian Gulf starts, killing 19 in Oman.
BIRTHS:
- 1872 – Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Indian-English scholar and translator (d. 1953)
- 1891 – B. R. Ambedkar, Indian economist, jurist, and politician, 1st Indian Minister of Law and Justice (d. 1956)
- 1919 – Shamshad Begum, Pakistani-Indian singer (d. 2013)
- 1921 – Thomas Schelling, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1927 – Alan MacDiarmid, New Zealand chemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2007)
- 1975 – Rajeshwari Sachdev, Indian actress
- 1983 – Nikoloz Tskitishvili, Georgian basketball player
- 1986 – Matt Derbyshire, English footballer
- 1997 – D. J. Moore, American football player
- 2000 – Patrick Surtain II, American football player
HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:
