EVENTS:
- 1835 – The first constitutional law in modern Serbia is adopted.
- 1870 – Stevens Institute of Technology is founded in New Jersey, USA and offers the first Bachelor of Engineering degree in Mechanical Engineering.
- 1901 – The association football club Alianza Lima is founded in Lima, Peru, under the name Sport Alianza.
- 1946 – ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, is formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
- 1961 – Sabena Flight 548 crashes in Belgium, killing 73, including the entire United States figure skating team along with several of their coaches and family members.
- 1971 – The decimalisation of British coinage is completed on Decimal Day.
- 1982 – The drilling rig Ocean Ranger sinks during a storm off the coast of Newfoundland, killing 84 workers.
- 2000 – Indian Point II nuclear power plant in New York vents a small amount of radioactive steam when a steam generator fails.
- 2001 – The first draft of the complete human genome is published in Nature.
- 2012 – 360 people die in a fire at a Honduran prison in the city of Comayagua.
- 2013 – A meteor explodes over Russia, injuring 1,500 people as a shock wave blows out windows and rocks buildings. This happens unexpectedly only hours before the expected closest ever approach of the larger and unrelated asteroid 2012 DA14.
- 2014 – Renaud Lavillenie of France breaks Sergey Bubka‘s world record in pole vault with a mark of 6.16 m.
- 2021 – Sixty people drown and hundreds are missing after a boat sinks on the Congo River near the village of Longola Ekoti, Mai-Ndombe Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
BIRTHS:
- 1861 – Charles Édouard Guillaume, Swiss-French physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1938)
- 1873 – Hans von Euler-Chelpin, German-Swiss biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1964)
- 1934 – Niklaus Wirth, Swiss computer scientist, created the Pascal programming language
- 1934 – Abe Woodson, American football player and minister (d. 2014)
- 1935 – Gene Hickerson, American football player (d. 2008)
- 1940 – John Hadl, American football player and coach
- 1949 – Ken Anderson, American football player and coach
- 1960 – Darrell Green, American football player
- 1979 – Josh Low, English footballer
- 1979 – Hamish Marshall, New Zealand cricketer
- 1979 – James Marshall, New Zealand cricketer
HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:
