Blackbeard Ransacks the Margaret
1717 English pirate Blackbeard ransacks the merchant sloop "Margaret" and keeps her captain, Henry Bostock, prisoner for 8 hours before releasing him. Bostock later provides the first record of Blackbeard's appearance and the source for his name
- 1766 Christie's, the world's largest auction house, holds its first sale in its permanent saleroom in Pall Mall, London
- 1854 Aaron Allen of Boston patents the folding theater chair
- 1882 US Patent Office grants patent #268503 for the exclusive right to make, use, or sell "animal-shaped buildings" to James V. Lafferty of Philadelphia; three novelty elephants are built: Elephant Bazaar in South Atlantic City, New Jersey (1881); Light of Asia in South Cape May, New Jersey (1884); and Elephantine Colossus in Coney Island, New York (1885) [1]
- 1908 The University of Pittsburgh is the first US college football team to use numerals on their uniform
- 1989 France's TGV train reaches a world record speed of 482.4 km/h (299.75 mph)
Audrey Hepburn's Famous Dress
2006 Audrey Hepburn's Givenchy little black dress from film "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is auctioned for charity for a record £467,200 ($923,187) at Christie's, London
Nicholas II Remains Identified
2008 Human remains previously found in 1991 are finally identified by Russian and American scientists as those of Tsar Nicholas II
- 2017 Artist Lubaina Himid wins Britain's Turner Prize as the oldest person at 63 and the first woman of color
BTS Most Tweeted
2017 Twitter reveals K-pop boy band BTS were the most tweeted-about celebrities in 2017
Einstein's $2.9M Letter
2018 Letter by Albert Einstein from 1954 on the concept of religion sells for $2.9 million at Christie's in New York
- 2021 First known hippos test positive for COVID-19 at Antwerp Zoo in Belgium, with staff putting Imani (14) and Hermien (41) into isolation [1]
- 2022 Construction begins on the world's biggest radio telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), in South Africa and Australia, with a collection area of nearly 500,000 square meters, built to test Einstein's theories and search for extraterrestrial life [1]
- 2023 Sculptor Jesse Darling wins the Turner Prize for his sculptures made of everyday objects [1]
- 2024 Mathematicians solve a 122-year-old puzzle known as "Dudeney's dissection" on how to dissect an equilateral triangle into a square using the smallest number of pieces [1]
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