Today in History December 10

1541 – Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham are executed for having affairs with Catherine Howard, Queen of England and wife of Henry VIII.
1684 – Isaac Newton‘s derivation of Kepler’s laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmond Halley.
1768 – The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is published.
1864 – Sherman’s March to the Sea: Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army troops reach the outer Confederate defenses of Savannah, Georgia.
1868 – The first traffic lights are installed, outside the Palace of Westminster in London. Resembling railway signals, they use semaphore arms and are illuminated at night by red and green gas lamps.
1884 – Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published.
1901 – The first Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm on the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death.
1906 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt wins the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the mediation of the Russo-Japanese War, becoming the first American to win a Nobel Prize.

1942 – Government of Poland in exile sends Raczynski’s Note, the first official report on the Holocaust, to 26 governments who signed the Declaration by United Nations.
1968 – Japan’s biggest heist, the still-unsolved 300 million yen robbery, is carried out in Tokyo.
1996 – The new Constitution of South Africa is promulgated by Nelson Mandela.

1815 – Ada Lovelace, English mathematician and computer scientist (d. 1852)
1934 – Howard Martin Temin, American geneticist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1994)

1198 – Averroes, Spanish astronomer, physicist, and philosopher (b. 1126)
1967 – Otis Redding, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1941)