EVENTS
- 1609 – The first telescope is demonstrated by Galileo.
Galileo - 1825 – Uruguay declares independence from the Brazilian empire. The Empire consisted of present-day Brazil and Uruguay and had declared its independence from Portugal in 1822. Despite the declaration of independence, Uruguay’s independence was not recognized by the Empire until August 1928, when the Treaty of Montevideo was signed.
- 1835 – First installment of the Great Moon Hoax is published. The New York-based newspaper “The Sun” published a series of articles, starting on this day, that detailed the discovery of civilization on the Moon.
- 1944 – Paris is liberated by the Allies in WWII.
- 1985 – Samantha Smith died in an airplane crash in Maine. In 1982, the 11-year-old American schoolgirl had written a letter to Soviet Russia’s leader Yuri Andropov asking, “Why do you want to conquer the whole world, or at least our country?” To her surprise, Andropov replied personally to her and offered an all-expense paid trip to the USSR. She toured Russia for two weeks amid worldwide publicity and came to symbolize American and Russian hopes for peaceful co-existence.
- 1991 – Michael Schumacher makes his Formula 1 debut.
- 1996 – Tiger Woods wins the U.S. Golf Amateur Championship.
- 2012 – First spacecraft to enter interstellar space. NASA’s Voyager 1, which was launched on September 5, 1977, left the heliosphere – the part of space that is not influenced by our Sun on this day. In February 1990, the spacecraft took the first overview picture of the solar system. It is the most distant man-made object in space.
BIRTHDAYS
- 1530 – Ivan the Terrible (Tsar of Russia)
- 1918 – American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts
- 1930 – Sean Connery (Actor played James Bond)
Sean Connery - 1931 – Regis Philbin (Talk show host)
- 1946 – Rollie Fingers (Baseball player)
- 1949 – Gene Simmons (Israeli/American singer-songwriter, bass player, producer, actor)
- 1954 – Elvis Costello (English singer-songwriter, producer)
- 1958 – Tim Burton (American director, producer, screenwriter)
- 1961 – Billy Ray Cyrus (Actor and Singer)
- 1968 – Rachel Ray (TV Show Host)
- 1970 – Claudia Schiffer (Model)
- 1987 – Blake Lively (Actress)
DEATHS
- 1227 – Genghis Khan (Mongolian emperor)
- 1776 – David Hume (Scottish economist, historian, philosopher)
David Hume - 1867 – Michael Faraday (English scientist)
- 1900 – Friedrich Nietzsche (German philosopher)
- 2012 – Neil Armstrong (American pilot, engineer, astronaut, first person to walk on the moon)
