First winter ascent of Mount Everest (1980), and Kosovo declares independence from Serbia (2008). Born on this day: Michael Jordan, Hal Holbrook and Otto Stern. Died: Molière, Giordano Bruno and Heinrich Heine.
31 events, 68 births and 69 deaths on this date.
Polish climbers Krzysztof Wielicki and Leszek Cichy reached the summit of Everest in winter for the first time, in brutal cold and high winds. It was a landmark in high-altitude mountaineering, as the season had long been considered almost impossible on the world's highest peak.
Mount_Everest_as_seen_from_Drukair2.jpg : shrimpo1967 derivative work: Papa Lima Whiskey 2 ( talk ) · CC BY-SA 2.0Kosovo's parliament declared independence from Serbia, a move backed by many Western countries but rejected by Serbia and its ally Russia. Recognition has remained partial, and the question still divides the Balkans.
Sweden skipped eleven days to move from the Julian calendar's reckoning to the Gregorian one, so 17 February was followed directly by 1 March. The reform was meant to close the gap between Swedish dates and those used elsewhere in Europe.
The reigning world champion, Garry Kasparov, won a match against Deep Blue, a supercomputer built to play chess. It showed that a human could still outplay a machine at the highest level of the game.
The House of Representatives formally settled the 1800 election in Thomas Jefferson's favour, making him the third US president. He was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, and his ideas on limited government shaped early American politics.
Rembrandt Peale · Public domain
As Union armies closed in, Confederate troops pulled out of Columbia and fires spread through the city centre, destroying much of it. The blaze remains a bitter point of memory in the South, with its cause still disputed.
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Michael Jordan is an American businessman and former basketball player, widely regarded as one of the greatest of all time. He won six NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls and became known as Air Jordan for his leaping style.
Joshua Massel . Cropped by en:User:Quadzilla99 · CC BY-SA 2.0
Hal Holbrook was an American actor best known for his one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, which he performed for more than sixty years. He also played the informant Deep Throat in All the President's Men.
NBC Television · Public domain
He was a German-American experimental physicist who won the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physics for refining the molecular beam method and measuring the proton's magnetic strength. He had been nominated 82 times before winning it.
Nobelprize.org · Public domain
Molière was the French playwright and actor who turned Commedia dell'arte and refined French comedy into plays still performed more than any other dramatist's at the Comédie-Française. He died on stage in 1673 while performing in one of his own comedies, The Imaginary Invalid.
Pierre Mignard I · Public domain
A former Dominican friar, he argued that the stars were distant suns with their own planets and that the universe had no centre. The Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy, and he was burned to death in Rome.
CC BY 4.0
German poet whose early lyrics were set to music by Schubert, Schumann and Mendelssohn. His satirical verse and prose, often banned at home, made him famous, and he spent his last 25 years in exile in Paris.
Moritz Daniel Oppenheim · Public domain
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