1633 – Battle of Liaoluo Bay: Dutch East India Company defeated by Chinese Ming naval forces in southern Fujian sea
1721 – Tsar Peter the Great becomes “All-Russian Imperator”
1879 – Thomas Edison perfects carbonized cotton filament light bulb
1884 – International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. adopts Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) worldwide, creating 24 international time zones with longitude zero at the Greenwich meridian
1907 – Panic of 1907: A run on Knickerbocker Trust Company stock leads to US wide run on banks
1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: US President John F. Kennedy addresses TV about Russian missile bases in Cuba and imposes a naval blockade on Cuba, beginning the missile crisis
1964 – French philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre was announced the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature; however, he became the first person to decline the award.
1978 – Pope John Paul II is inaugurated as Pope
2008 – Chandrayaan-1, India’s first lunar space probe, was launched, and it later found water in the Moon’s atmosphere.
2010 – WikiLeaks, a Web site founded by Julian Assange that functioned as a clearinghouse for classified or otherwise privileged information, released thousands of U.S. documents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2019 – Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan agree deal to jointly control former Kurdish territory in Northern Syria
2019 – Legislation for Northern Ireland legalizing same-sex marriage and abortion comes into effect
2020 – Goldman Sachs agrees to pay record $3 billion to end probe into its role in 1MDB corruption scandal to regulators in the US, UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia
TV & Film:
1942 – “Now, Voyager” film directed by Irving Rapper starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rain premieres in New Yor
Music:
1883 – New York’s original Metropolitan Opera House has its grand opening with a performance of the opera “Faust”
1988 – Elton John sells out Madison Square Garden for a record 26th time
Sport:
1978 – 8th NYC Women’s Marathon won by Grete Waitz in her first appearance in world record time 2:32:30
