EVENTS
- 1513 – Explorer Juan Ponce de Leon sights North America.
Juan Ponce de Leon - 1794 – United States Navy founded.
- 1871 – England and Scotland compete in the first international rugby match. Like association football, rugby is a British invention. Today, it is a popular sport mainly in large parts of the British Commonwealth.
- 1914 – The first successful blood transfusion is performed.
- 1958 – Nikita Khrushchev becomes Premier of the Soviet Union.
- 1977 – The worst accident in the history of civil aviation occurred as two Boeing 747 jets collided on the ground in the Canary Islands, resulting in 570 deaths.
- 1980 – The oil rig Alexander L. Kjelland collapses in high winds in the North Sea. Only 89 of 212 crew survived the Norwegian platform’s capsizing, which was caused by a fatigue crack in one of the legs.
- 1994 – Silvio Berlusconi rises to power in Italy. In his 20 years in Italian politics, Berlusconi arguably made more headlines for his numerous affairs and scandals than for his policies. In 2013, he was sentenced to 4 years imprisonment for tax fraud.
- 1998 – Viagra is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Pfizer’s pill was the first drug against male impotence to be approved in the United States. In 2012, the company made 2 billion U.S. Dollars from Viagra alone.
BIRTHDAYS
- 1845 – Wilhelm Röntgen (German physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
- 1924 – Sarah Vaughan (American singer)
- 1950 – Tony Banks (Singer)
- 1963 – Quentin Tarantino (Movie director)
Quentin Tarantino - 1970 – Mariah Carey (Singer)
- 1971 – David Coulthard (Scottish race car driver)
- 1975 – Fergie (Singer for Black Eyed Peas)
DEATHS
- 1968 – Yuri Gagarin (Russian pilot, astronaut)
- 1972 – M. C. Escher (Dutch illustrator)
- 2002 – Billy Wilder (Austrian/American director)
Billy Wilder - 2006 – Rudolf Vrba (Czech/Canadian holocaust survivor, educator)
