Thomas Edison patents the phonograph (1878), and Britain grants Cyprus independence (1959). Born on this day: Nicolaus Copernicus, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Svante Arrhenius. Died: Timur, Umberto Eco and Deng Xiaoping.
30 events, 82 births and 67 deaths on this date.
Edison's phonograph could record sound and play it back. It took many years to succeed commercially, but it brought him international fame.
Louis Bachrach, Bachrach Studios , restored by Michel Vuijlsteke · Public domainAfter years of armed struggle between Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities and the British colonial authorities, London agreed to hand over the island. Independence was not formally proclaimed until the following year, when Cyprus became a republic with its own constitution.
British explorer William Smith sighted the South Shetland Islands, a chain of icy islands off Antarctica, after being blown off course on a voyage to Chile. The find opened the way for sealing crews and later Antarctic exploration.
Winnipeg staged a make-believe Nazi occupation, complete with a book-burning and the arrest of local politicians. It took place during the Second World War, in a city thousands of miles from the fighting.
Sigismund III, already elected to the Polish–Lithuanian throne, takes up the Swedish crown too, inheriting it from his father John III. The double kingship later drew Sweden and the Commonwealth into a long and bitter rivalry over the Baltic.
William IV's signature gave legal form to a new British province on Australia's southern coast. The king, nicknamed the Sailor King, had served in the Royal Navy in his youth before taking the throne.
Martin Archer Shee · Public domain
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Copernicus was a Renaissance polymath who placed the Sun, not the Earth, at the centre of the universe. His book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, published in 1543 near the end of his life, helped start the Copernican Revolution.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Argentine lawyer and Peronist politician who served as president from 2007 to 2015, and was the first woman in that office to be directly elected. She later served as vice president from 2019 to 2023.
Víctor Bugge · CC BY 2.0
Swedish physicist often called a chemist, who helped found physical chemistry and won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was also the first to estimate how much rising carbon dioxide would warm the Earth, an early step in climate science.
Photogravure Meisenbach Riffarth & Co. Leipzig. · Public domain
Timur was a Turco-Mongol conqueror who built a huge empire across Central Asia, Iran and beyond, and was never beaten in battle. He is also remembered as a patron of poets and scholars, and his reign sparked a flowering of the arts.
1405-1409 artist · Public domain
Italian semiotician and novelist who died in Milan, best known for The Name of the Rose, a medieval murder mystery that became an international bestseller. He also wrote a long-running newspaper column and the essay Ur-Fascism.
Rob Bogaerts for Anefo · CC0
Deng Xiaoping led China from 1978 to 1989 and is remembered as the architect of its market-oriented reforms and opening to the outside world. Once purged twice by Mao, he returned to power and steered the country toward a socialist market economy.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
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