EVENTS:
- 1512 – Martin Luther joins the theological faculty of the University of Wittenberg.
- 1816 – The Penang Free School is founded in George Town, Penang, Malaysia, by the Rev Hutchings, the oldest English-language school in Southeast Asia.
- 1879 – Thomas Edison invents a workable electric light bulb at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J. which was tested the next day and lasted 13.5 hours. This would be the invention of the first commercially practical incandescent light. Popular belief is that he invented the first light bulb, which he did not.
- 1888 – Foundation of the Swiss Social Democratic Party.
- 1940 – The first edition of the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published.
- 1943 – The Provisional Government of Free India is formally declared by Subhas Chandra Bose.
- 1977 – The European Patent Institute is founded.
- 1983 – The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
- 2013 – Record smog closes schools, roadways, and the airport in Harbin, China.
- 2019 – Thirty people are killed in a fiery bus crash in western Democratic Republic of the Congo.
- 2019 – In Canada, the 2019 Canadian federal election ends, resulting in incumbent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau remaining in office, albeit with the Liberal Party in a minority government.
- 2021 – A shooting occurs on the set of the film Rust, in which actor Alec Baldwin discharged a prop weapon which had been loaded, killing the director of photography, Halyna Hutchins, and injuring director Joel Souza.
BIRTHS:
- 1833 – Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist and engineer, invented dynamite and founded the Nobel Prize (d. 1896)
- 1851 – George Ulyett, English cricketer and footballer (d. 1898)
- 1887 – Krishna Singh, Indian politician, 1st Chief Minister of Bihar (d. 1961)
- 1931 – Shammi Kapoor, Indian actor and director (d. 2011)
- 1940 – Geoffrey Boycott, English cricketer and sportscaster
- 1942 – Christopher A. Sims, American economist and statistician, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1952 – Trevor Chappell, Australian cricketer and coach
- 1957 – Wolfgang Ketterle, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1958 – Andre Geim, Russian-English physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1971 – Damien Martyn, Australian cricketer
- 1986 – Scott Rendell, English footballer
- 1991 – Vadaine Oliver, English footballer
- 1991 – Harry Pell, English footballer
- 1995 – Cameron Burgess, Scottish-Australian footballer
HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:
