- 1206 Crusader Wallon de Sarton presents Bishop of Amiens Richard de Gerberoy with purported skull of John the Baptist, stolen from Constantinople (Amiens cathedral later built to house it)
- 1791 A traffic regulation creates the first one-way street in New York City
- 1900 First prize of 100,000 francs is offered for communication with extraterrestrials, with Martians excluded because they are considered too easy
1903 At 10:35 am, Orville Wright pilots the first sustained, powered, and controlled flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; the flight lasts 12 seconds and covers 120 feet
- 1924 First US diesel electric locomotive enters service in the Bronx, New York
- 1959 "On The Beach" is the first film to premiere simultaneously on both sides of the Iron Curtain
- 1969 USAF closes its Project Blue Book, concluding there is no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind thousands of UFO sightings
- 1986 Davina Thompson makes medical history by undergoing the first combined heart, lung, and liver transplant at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England
The Simpsons
1989 "The Simpsons," created by Matt Groening, premieres on Fox TV as a full animated series with the episode "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"
- 1992 Japanese paleoanthropologist Gen Suwa discovers a tooth of the 4.4 million year old hominid Ardipithecus ramidus
- 2003 SpaceShipOne flight 11P, piloted by Brian Binnie, makes its first supersonic flight
- 2003 Third Lord of the Rings film "The Return of the King" is released, earning $72 million on its opening weekend and becoming only the second film to gross over $1 billion worldwide
- 2012 Jiroemon Kimura of Japan becomes the world's verified oldest living person at 116 years old
- 2017 French sailor François Gabart sets round-the-world record for fastest solo navigation of the globe in 42 days and 16 hours
- 2018 Astronomers identify furtherest object in the solar system as 2018 VG18 (nicknamed Farout), 120 x further from the Sun than Earth
- 2018 Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster's word of the year is "justice"
- 2018 US poacher is sentenced to watch the film "Bambi" once a month during his year-long sentence in prison for killing hundreds of deer in Missouri
- 2019 England's Fallon Sherrock becomes the first woman to win a match at the PDC World Darts Championship, beating compatriot Ted Evetts 3-2 at the Alexandra Palace in London
- 2019 The DNA of a young girl or woman is successfully extracted from a 5,700-year-old piece of birch tar used as chewing gum found on Lolland Island, Denmark
- 2021 Discovery of the first true millipede (Eumillipes persephone) with 1,000 legs found down a drill hole in Western Australia is published in "Scientific Reports" [1]
- 2022 Minnesota Vikings recover from a 33-0 deficit at halftime to beat the Indianapolis Colts 39-36 in overtime at U.S. Bank Stadium, Minneapolis, MN; the biggest comeback in NFL history
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