George Washington elected first president of the United States (1789), and Facebook launches as TheFacebook.com (2004). Born on this day: Rosa Parks, Ludwig Erhard and Charles Lindbergh. Died: Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, Septimius Severus and Satyendra Nath Bose.
32 events, 82 births and 61 deaths on this date.
Washington was chosen unanimously by the electors, becoming the first person to hold the presidency under the new Constitution. He had led the Continental Army to victory over Britain, and his election set the pattern for every president who followed.
Gilbert Stuart · Public domainMark Zuckerberg and Harvard roommates put the site online, taking its name from the paper student directories. It began with Harvard students only, then reached other universities.
Macau ordered its casinos shut for fifteen days as the coronavirus spread, halting the gambling industry that drives the territory's economy. The move was one of the earliest large-scale business closures tied to the pandemic outside mainland China.
France's lawmakers voted to end slavery in every territory under the republic, a rare step that freed people held as property. The ban did not hold in the French West Indies, where slavery was restored in 1802.
Six Southern states that had broken from the Union sent delegates to Montgomery, Alabama, to start building a new government. Their work produced the Confederate States of America, and the city became its first capital.
In Paris, French President Jacques Chirac and UNESCO's director general Koichiro Matsuura signed a charter at a cancer summit, setting up a yearly awareness day. World Cancer Day has been marked on this date ever since.
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Rosa Parks was an American civil rights activist best known for refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955. Her refusal helped spark the Montgomery bus boycott, which became a turning point in the fight against Jim Crow segregation.
Gene Herrick for the Associated Press; restored by Adam Cuerden · Public domain
Ludwig Erhard was a German economist and politician who guided West Germany's postwar economic recovery as economy minister, then served as chancellor from 1963 to 1966. He helped champion the social market economy, a model that still shapes German economic policy today.
Adrian, Doris · CC BY-SA 3.0 de
Lindbergh was an American aviator who, in 1927, became the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris. The flight turned him into a global celebrity and helped launch a boom in commercial flying and air mail.
George W. Harris / Martha Ewing · Public domain
Dutch theoretical physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize with Pieter Zeeman for explaining how magnetism splits light lines. He also worked out the Lorentz transformation, a key piece of Einstein's special relativity, and the force acting on charged particles in fields.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Septimius Severus rose from provincial origins in North Africa to rule Rome for eighteen years, after a civil war that followed the murder of Pertinax. He died at York during a campaign against the tribes of Caledonia, leaving the throne to his sons Caracalla and Geta.
Public domain
Satyendra Nath Bose was an Indian physicist whose early 1920s work on quantum statistics became the foundation of Bose–Einstein statistics. Paul Dirac later named the particles those statistics describe after him: bosons.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
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