EVENTS:
- 1792 – Highwayman Nicolas J. Pelletier becomes the first person executed by guillotine.
- 1859 – British and French engineers break ground for the Suez Canal.
- 1901 – New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates.
- 1944 – The United Negro College Fund is incorporated.
- 1945 – Fifty nations gather in San Francisco to begin the United Nations Conference on International Organization.
- 1953 – Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish “Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” describing the double helix structure of DNA.
- 1959 – The Saint Lawrence Seaway, linking the North American Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, officially opens to shipping.
- 1960 – The United States Navy submarine USS Triton completes the first submerged circumnavigation of the globe.
- 1961 – Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.
- 1983 – Pioneer 10 travels beyond Pluto’s orbit.
- 2005 – One hundred seven people die in Amagasaki rail crash in Japan.
- 2007 – Boris Yeltsin‘s funeral: The first to be sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church for a head of state since the funeral of Emperor Alexander III in 1894.
- 2015 – Nearly 9,100 are killed after a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake strikes Nepal.
BIRTHS:
- 1874 – Guglielmo Marconi, Italian businessman and inventor, developed Marconi’s law, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1937)
- 1900 – Wolfgang Pauli, Austrian-Swiss physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1958)
- 1948 – Mike Selvey, English cricketer and sportscaster
- 1961 – Dinesh D’Souza, Indian-American journalist and author
- 1967 – Tim Davie, English broadcaster
- 1990 – Taylor Walker, Australian footballer
- 1993 – Raphaël Varane, French footballer
