Plutonium identified for the first time at Berkeley (1941), and Manila is liberated by Filipino and American forces (1945). Born on this day: Naruhito, George Frideric Handel and Viktor Yushchenko. Died: Carl Friedrich Gauss, John Quincy Adams and John Keats.
30 events, 64 births and 69 deaths on this date.
Seaborg's team at Berkeley identified plutonium, which they had made by bombarding uranium-238 in a cyclotron. Named after Pluto, it later fuelled nuclear weapons and reactors, though wartime secrecy kept the work unpublished until 1948.
Los Alamos National Laboratory · AttributionAfter a month of bitter street fighting, Manila was retaken from Japanese occupation by combined Filipino and American troops. The battle left much of the city in ruins, and its recapture was a major step in driving Japan out of the Philippines.
Under a treaty signed in Havana, Cuba granted the United States a lease on Guantánamo Bay for as long as the arrangement lasted, a phrase that has since come to mean indefinitely. The base it created is still there, and it has been a source of dispute between the two countries ever since.
Soviet authorities began forcibly moving the Chechen and Ingush peoples from the North Caucasus to Central Asia, accusing them of collaboration with the Germans. Many died in transit or in the harsh conditions of exile, and the survivors were not allowed to return home until 1957.
Crowds in the Russian capital, then Petrograd, took to the streets over bread shortages and the war, starting the February Revolution that brought down the tsar. The protests grew quickly, and within days the monarchy had collapsed.
Alabama became the first US state to pass a law against trusts, business combinations that tried to control prices and crush competition. It was an early attempt by a state to rein in big business before federal law caught up.
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Naruhito is the Emperor of Japan, who succeeded his father Akihito in 2019 and has reigned since as the 126th monarch in the traditional line. He studied history at Gakushuin University and English at Oxford, and is known for his work on water conservation.
Presidencia de Guatemala · Public domain
Handel was a German-born composer who settled in London and became famous for operas, oratorios and the choral work Messiah. His orchestral Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks remain widely loved today.
Attributed to Balthasar Denner · Public domain
Ukrainian banker and politician who served as the country's third president from 2005 to 2010. He is remembered for leading the Orange Revolution, after surviving a dioxin poisoning during the 2004 election campaign that left his face disfigured.
Secretariat of the President of Ukraine · CC BY 4.0
Known as a child prodigy, he went on to shape number theory, geometry and the normal distribution. He directed the Göttingen Observatory and wrote Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, a number theory landmark.
Gottlieb Biermann / After Christian Albrecht Jensen · Public domain
Adams, the sixth US president, returned to Congress after leaving the White House and sat as a House member until he collapsed at his desk. He spent years there opposing the expansion of slavery, and he died in the Capitol two days later.
jklamo Cleaned and enhanced by Julielangford · Public domain
Keats, a second-generation English Romantic poet, died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, just four years after his first poems appeared. His reputation grew sharply after his death, and he is now among the most studied poets in English.
William Hilton · Public domain
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