EVENTS:
- 627 – Battle of the Trench: Muhammad undergoes a 14-day siege at Medina (Saudi Arabia) by Meccan forces under Abu Sufyan.
- 1889 – The Eiffel Tower is officially opened.
- 1901 – 1901 Black Sea earthquake
- 1903 – Richard Pearse allegedly makes a powered flight in an early aircraft.
- 1909 – Construction of the ill fated RMS Titanic begins.
- 1951 – Remington Rand delivers the first UNIVAC I computer to the United States Census Bureau.
- 1966 – The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first space probe to enter orbit around the Moon.
- 1970 – Explorer 1 re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere after 12 years in orbit.
- 1985 – The first WrestleMania, the biggest wrestling event from the WWE (then the WWF), takes place in Madison Square Garden in New York.
- 1994 – The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull.
- 1998 – Netscape released Mozilla source code under an open source license.
- 2004 – Iraq War in Anbar Province: In Fallujah, Iraq, four American private military contractors working for Blackwater USA, are killed after being ambushed.
- 2005 – The dwarf planet Makemake is discovered by a team led by astronomer Michael E. Brown at the Palomar Observatory.
- 2016 – NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Roscosmos cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko return to Earth after a yearlong mission at the International Space Station.
- 2018 – Start of the 2018 Armenian revolution.
- 2023 – A historic tornado outbreak occurs in the American Midwest and its northern South.
BIRTHS:
- 1865 – Anandi Gopal Joshi, Indian physician (d. 1887)
- 1890 – William Lawrence Bragg, Australian-English physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1971)
- 1906 – Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Japanese physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1979)
- 1914 – Octavio Paz, Mexican poet and diplomat, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1998)
- 1934 – Carlo Rubbia, Italian physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1934 – Kamala Surayya, Indian poet and author
- 1938 – Sheila Dikshit, Indian politician, 22nd Governor of Kerala
- 1983 – Hashim Amla, South African cricketer
- 1984 – Rakshita, Indian actress and producer
- 1987 – Humpy Koneru, Indian chess player
- 1992 – Adam Zampa, Australian cricketer
- 2005 – Reed Baker-Whiting, American professional footballer
HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:
- Freedom Day (Malta)
- King Nangklao Memorial Day (Thailand)
- Thomas Mundy Peterson Day (New Jersey, United States)
- Transfer Day (US Virgin Islands)
