Burj Khalifa officially opens in Dubai (2010), and Britain declares war on Spain (1762). Born on this day: Isaac Newton, Gao Xingjian and Louis Braille. Died: Albert Camus, Erwin Schrödinger and T.S. Eliot.
26 events, 51 births and 65 deaths on this date.
The tower opened as the centrepiece of Downtown Dubai, a mixed-use district. It was renamed after Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, then UAE president, who arranged federal support when the developer ran into money trouble.
Tim.Reckmann · CC BY-SA 3.0Britain's declaration pulled Spain into the Seven Years' War, turning a conflict already fought across Europe and overseas into one with another major power on the opposing side. Spain's entry meant the Iberian kingdom now fought Britain directly, alongside its ally France.
After months of fighting, Chinese and North Korean troops took the South Korean capital again, forcing UN and South Korean forces to fall back south of the Han River. The loss was a sharp setback for the allies, who had only recently recovered the city themselves.
After centuries under Ottoman control, the Bulgarian capital was freed during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 to 1878. The city would be chosen as capital of the new Bulgarian state the following year, starting a period of rapid growth.
Utah entered the Union once its dominant Mormon community agreed to outlaw polygamy, ending years of delay caused by disputes with Congress. The territory had been waiting for statehood since the United States took it from Mexico in 1848.
Captain William McDonald, sailing the Samarang, sighted a small volcanic group in the southern Indian Ocean, islands that later became part of Australia's remote territory. They are barren, glaciated and rarely visited, lying near Heard Island.
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Newton was an English mathematician and physicist whose 1687 book, the Principia, explained how objects move and how gravity pulls on them, shaping physics for centuries. He also helped develop calculus, sharing credit with Leibniz, and his work underpins much of modern science.
Godfrey Kneller · Public domain
Chinese-born novelist, playwright and painter who won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. His plays were banned in China, and he later took French citizenship in 1997.
Jwh · CC BY-SA 3.0 lu
Still a student at France's Royal Institute for Blind Youth, Louis Braille devised a raised-dot code for reading and writing. It is now used worldwide in many languages and even music, though most teachers ignored it for years after his death.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Albert Camus was a French writer and philosopher, remembered for novels such as The Stranger and The Plague. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957 and died in a car crash in 1960.
Photograph by United Press International · Public domain
Austrian physicist whose wave equation gave quantum theory its key mathematical tool, and whose thought experiment about a cat in a box became one of science's best-known images. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics, then spent years in Dublin after fleeing the Nazis.
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain
Eliot was an American-born poet who settled in England and helped reshape English-language modernist verse with works like The Waste Land. He also wrote plays such as Murder in the Cathedral and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Thomas Stearns Eliot with his sister and his cousin by Lady Ottoline Morrell.jpg : Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938) derivative work: Octave.H · Public domain
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