Washington arrives at Grays Ferry, Philadelphia (1789), and Pasteur and Bernard complete experiment against spontaneous generation (1862). Born on this day: Adolf Hitler, Napoleon III and Joan Miró. Died: Ferdinand Braun, Bram Stoker and Idriss Déby.
33 events, 69 births and 59 deaths on this date.
Washington was on his way to New York, where he would be sworn in as the first president under the new Constitution. Grays Ferry, in Philadelphia, was one stop along that journey.
Gilbert Stuart · Public domainLouis Pasteur and Claude Bernard showed that life did not simply appear on its own. Sealed, sterilised flasks stayed clear, while open ones grew microbes, which helped settle where germs came from.
American forces took Leipzig, a long-established trade and publishing city in Saxony. The city was later handed over to the Soviet Union, which then ran it as part of East Germany.
Congress had authorised military action to free Cuba from Spanish rule, and McKinley's signature set the United States on course for a short conflict that also brought the Philippines and Puerto Rico under American control.
photographer · Public domain
The Curies worked on radium chloride, a radioactive substance they kept purifying to a higher standard. Their research on radioactivity later won them a share of the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Born in the Tuileries Palace in Paris, nephew of Napoleon I, he would become the first elected president of France and then its last monarch. He ruled as emperor from 1852 until defeat by Prussia at Sedan in 1870.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter · Public domain
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Adolf Hitler, born in Braunau am Inn, led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator before and during the Second World War. He oversaw the Holocaust, in which roughly six million Jewish people were murdered.
Unknown author Unknown author · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Nephew of Napoleon I, he rose from failed coups to become France's president and then emperor. He is remembered for rebuilding Paris under Haussmann and for losing the throne after defeat at Sedan in 1870.
Franz Xaver Winterhalter · Public domain
Catalan painter, sculptor and ceramicist whose playful, dreamlike art drew on the unconscious mind and is often linked to Surrealism. His work mixed childlike images with bold, personal shapes and colours.
Carl Van Vechten · Public domain
German physicist who shared the 1909 Nobel Prize with Guglielmo Marconi for work that made long-range radio practical. He also built an early cathode-ray tube and an early semiconductor diode, both steps towards television and modern electronics.
Public domain
Bram Stoker was an Irish writer best remembered for Dracula, the 1897 Gothic novel that gave the world Count Dracula. Before becoming a novelist he spent years as a theatre critic and business manager at London's Lyceum Theatre.
unidentified photographer · Public domain
Chad's president for 30 years, Déby seized power in a 1990 coup and became the country's longest-serving leader. He died in April 2021 from wounds sustained fighting rebels in the Northern Chad offensive.
Office of the White House (Amanda Lucidon) · Public domain
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