Today's 15 January Fun Facts in History

910 One of the last known Maya dated monuments, a stela from the city of Itzimte (modern Guatemala)

1797 First top hat worn by John Etherington of London

Poor Folk

1846 Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky's first novel "Poor Folk" is published in the St Petersburg Collection almanac

1870 Donkey first used as symbol of Democratic Party, in Harper's Weekly

1907 3-element vacuum tube patented by American inventor Lee De Forest
1919 Two million gallons of molasses flood Boston, Massachusetts, in the "Great Molasses Flood" when a storage tank bursts, drowning 21 and injuring 150
1935 300 Dutch ice cream vendors protest against Italian competition
1943 The world's largest office building, the Pentagon, is completed to house the US military

1975 Pioneering American female comedian Phyllis Diller gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame
1975 Space Mountain opens at Disney World in Orlando, Florida
1993 Top Italian mafia leader Salvatore "Toto" Riina arrested in Palermo, Sicily
2001 Wikipedia, a free Wiki or content encyclopedia, is launched by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
2005 ESA's SMART-1 lunar orbiter discovers elements such as calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron, and other surface elements on the moon
2014 LA Dodgers sign pitcher Clayton Kershaw to the biggest deal in baseball history, a 7-year, $215 million package averaging $30.7 million per season
2016 American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan unveils newest exhibit replica skeleton of a Titanosaur dinosaur (found 2010 Argentina), largest known dinosaur at 70 tons, 37m
2025 Ispace and Firefly Aerospace launch their missions to the Moon, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, included is art project of a little red model of a Swedish house [1]