EVENTS:
- 1704 – The first regular newspaper in British Colonial America, The Boston News-Letter, is published.
- 1895 – Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail single-handedly around the world, sets sail from Boston, Massachusetts aboard the sloop “Spray”.
- 1913 – The Woolworth Building skyscraper in New York City is opened.
- 1914 – The Franck–Hertz experiment, a pillar of quantum mechanics, is presented to the German Physical Society.
- 1916 – Ernest Shackleton and five men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition launch a lifeboat from uninhabited Elephant Island in the Southern Ocean to organise a rescue for the ice-trapped ship Endurance.
- 1922 – The first segment of the Imperial Wireless Chain providing wireless telegraphy between Leafield in Oxfordshire, England, and Cairo, Egypt, comes into operation.
- 1957 – Suez Crisis: The Suez Canal is reopened following the introduction of UNEF peacekeepers to the region.
- 1970 – The first Chinese satellite, Dong Fang Hong I, is launched.
- 1990 – STS-31: The Hubble Space Telescope is launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery.
- 2005 – Snuppy becomes world’s first cloned dog.
- 2013 – A building collapses near Dhaka, Bangladesh, killing 1,129 people and injuring 2,500 others.
BIRTHS:
- 1929 – Rajkumar, Indian actor and singer (d. 2006)
- 1934 – Jayakanthan, Indian journalist and author (d. 2015)
- 1947 – Roger D. Kornberg, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1957 – Nazir Ahmed, Baron Ahmed, Pakistani-English businessman and politician
- 1970 – Damien Fleming, Australian cricketer, coach, and sportscaster
- 1973 – Sachin Tendulkar, Indian cricketer
- 1987 – Varun Dhawan, Indian actor
- 1997 – Veronika Kudermetova, Russian tennis player
HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:
