From Reference.com, On this Day
Events
1783 - François de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandres made the first human flight in a hot-air balloon, in Paris, in a balloon built by the Joseph-Michel Montgolfier and Jacques-Etienne Montgolfier.
1877 - Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph.
1918 - The German High Seas Fleet surrendered to the Allies.
1922 - Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia was sworn in as the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate.
1929 - Surrealist painter Salvador Dali had his first exhibit.
1942 - The Alcan Highway, an overland military supply route to the U.S. territory of Alaska, linking Canada and Alaska, was opened. It is now called the Alaska Highway. Passing through the Yukon, the more than 1,500-mile roadway connected Dawson Creek, British Columbia with Fairbanks, Alaska
1953 - The discovery of the Piltdown Man skull by Charles Dawson in Sussex in 1912 was revealed as a hoax.
1964 - New York's Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened.
1967 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the air quality act, which allotted money to fight air pollution.
1973 - The 18.5-minute gap in one of Richard Nixon's White House tape recordings related to Watergate was revealed by Nixon's lawyer.
1980 - A fire at the MGM Grand Hotel-Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada killed 87 people.
1980 - Approximately 83 million people tuned in to find out "who shot J.R." on the TV show "Dallas."
1990 - Leaders of NATO and Warsaw Pact member states signed the Charter of Paris and a treaty on conventional forces in Europe, bringing an end to the Cold War.
1995 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above the 5000 mark for the first time.
2002 - NATO invited the seven former communist countries into its membership.
2004 - Donald Trump's casino empire filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
2008 - Writer, blogger, columnist James Wigderson turned 40
