Today's 22 January Fun Facts in History

1472 Great comet of 1471 (C/1471 Y1) becomes the closest comet in modern times, coming within 10 million kilometers of Earth [1]
1673 Regular mail delivery begins between New York and Boston

Byron Completes Poems

1816 Lord Byron completes poems "Parisina" and "Siege of Corinth"

1831 Charles Darwin takes his Bachelors of Art exam at Christ's College, Cambridge, coming tenth out of 171 candidates

1881 Cleopatra's Needle, a 3,500-year-old Ancient Egyptian obelisk, is erected in Central Park, New York [1]

1901 After 63 years, Britain stops the sale of the Queen Victoria postage stamp series and begins the King Edward VII series

1908 Katie Mulcahey is arrested for lighting a cigarette, violating the one-day-old "Sullivan Ordinance" banning women from smoking in public, and is fined $5. Appearing before the judge, she states, “I’ve got as much right to smoke as you have. I never heard of this new law, and I don’t want to hear about it. No man shall dictate to me.”
1931 Jazz trumpeter Clyde McCoy records "Sugar Blues" for Columbia Records; sells over 14 million copies internationally
1964 World's largest cheese (15,723 kg) is produced in Wisconsin for the New York World's Fair
1976 Bank robbery in Beirut nets a record $20 to $50 million
2014 Water vapour is detected on the dwarf planet Ceres
2018 Netflix becomes the largest digital media and entertainment company in the world worth $100 billion