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Events

• 1325 – Alfonso IV becomes King of Portugal.
• 1558 – France takes Calais, the last continental possession of England.
• 1598 – Boris Godunov becomes Tsar of Russia.
• 1608 – Fire destroys Jamestown, Virginia.
• 1610 – Galileo Galilei observes the four largest moons of Jupiter for the first time. He named them and in turn the four are called the Galilean moons.
• 1782 – The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opens.
• 1785 – Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and America John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
• 1797 – The modern Italian flag is first used.
• 1835 – drops anchor off the Chonos Archipelago.
• 1894 – W.K. Dickson receives a patent for motion picture film.
• 1904 – The distress signal "CQD" is established only to be replaced two years later by "SOS".
• 1922 – Dáil Éireann ratifies the Anglo-Irish Treaty by a 64-57 vote.
• 1927 – The first transatlantic telephone call is made – from New York City to London.
• 1931 – Guy Menzies flies the first solo non-stop trans-Tasman flight (from Australia to New Zealand) in 11 hours and 45 minutes, crash-landing on New Zealand's west coast.
• 1935 – Benito Mussolini and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval sign the Franco–Italian Agreement.
• 1942 – World War II: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.
• 1945 – World War II: British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.
• 1950 – A fire at the Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa, kills 41 people.
• 1953 – President Harry Truman announces that the United States has developed the hydrogen bomb.
• 1954 – Georgetown-IBM experiment: the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
• 1959 – The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
• 1960 – The Polaris missile is test launched.
• 1968 – Surveyor Program: Surveyor 7, the final spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from launch complex 36A, Cape Canaveral.
• 1972 – Iberia Airlines Caravelle 6-R crashes into Mont San Jose on approach to Ibiza Airport killing all 104 on board.
• 1973 – Mark Essex fatally shoots 10 people and wounds 13 others at Howard Johnson's Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana before being shot to death by police officers.
• 1979 – Third Indochina War – Cambodian-Vietnamese War: Phnom Penh falls to the advancing Vietnamese troops, driving out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
• 1980 – President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.
• 1984 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
• 1990 – The interior of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to the public because of safety concerns.
• 1993 – The Fourth Republic of Ghana is inaugurated with Jerry Rawlings as President.
• 1999 – The impeachment of President Bill Clinton begins.
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