837 – 15th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet
1807 – The U.S. Congress passed an act to “prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States… from any foreign kingdom, place, or country.”
1814 – Ludwig von Beethoven’s 8th Symphony in F premieres
1854 – Composer Robert Schumann saved from suicide attempt in Rhine River
1860 – Abraham Lincoln makes a speech at Cooper Union that is largely responsible for his election to the presidency.
1879 – Constantine Fahlberg discovers saccharin (artificial sweetener)
1903 – The Martha Washington Hotel opened for business in New York City. The hotel had 416 rooms and was the first hotel exclusively for women.
1907 – Psychiatrists Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud meet for the first time in Vienna
1919 – American Association for Hard of Hearing forms in NYC
Louis Vuitton
1933 – The motion picture King Kong had its world premiere in New York.
1933 – The Reichstag, German parliament building, destroyed by fire; it was set by the Nazis, who blamed it on Communists
1998 – Apple discontinues development of the Newton computer
2004 – NASA announced that the Mars rover Opportunity had discovered evidence that water had existed on Mars in the past
2012 – Wikileaks begins disclosing 5 million emails
Birthdays
1622 – Rembrandt Carel Fabritius, Dutch painter
1807 – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Portland Maine, poet (Hiawatha)
1902 – John Steinbeck, Salinas California, author (Grapes of Wrath-Nobel 1962)
Deaths
1892 – Louis Vuitton, French luggage maker (b. 1821)
1936 – Ivan Pavlov, Russian physiologist (reflexes, Nobel 1904), dies at 86
2011 – Frank Buckles, last surviving American World War I veteran (b. 1901)