Future US president Rutherford B. Hayes is born (1822), and German submarine sinks Japanese merchant ship Hirano Maru (1918). Born on this day: Rutherford B. Hayes, Buster Keaton and Susan Sarandon. Died: Rembrandt, Max Planck and Janis Joplin.
30 events, 79 births and 54 deaths on this date.
He would become the 19th president of the United States, taking office after a disputed election that he won while losing the popular vote. Before that, he fought for the Union in the Civil War and was wounded five times.
Mathew Benjamin Brady · Public domainA German submarine sank the Japanese merchant ship Hirano Maru in the Celtic Sea, with 291 people lost. Japan had joined the Allies in the war, so the sinking hit a ship from one of the nations fighting against Germany.
The anonymous-source publishing site went online, promising a home for leaks that governments and companies might want hidden. It later drew attention for releasing large troves of military and diplomatic files.
Paul VI, still overseeing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, set out on his first journey across the Atlantic as pope. It followed his 1964 trip to Jordan, the first time a reigning pontiff had left Italy in more than a century.
Fotografia Felici · Public domain
The Ottomans declared war after Russian troops occupied the Danubian Principalities and Tsar Nicholas I pressed claims over the empire's Orthodox subjects. Britain and France later joined on the Ottoman side, turning it into a wider struggle centred on the Black Sea.
James Robertson / Felice Beato · Public domain
Sputnik 1, a polished metal sphere about 58 centimetres wide, became the first human-made object to orbit the Earth. Its radio signal could be picked up by amateur operators worldwide, and its success stunned the United States and kicked off the Space Race.
CC BY-SA 3.0
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Hayes was a lawyer and Union officer who was wounded five times in the Civil War. He went on to win a disputed 1876 presidential election, taking office after a commission awarded him contested votes.
Mathew Benjamin Brady · Public domain
Known as The Great Stone Face, Keaton wove daring physical stunts into silent films such as The General and Sherlock Jr. Critics still rank his 1920s work among the finest comedy ever filmed.
Bain News Service · Public domain
American actor best known for Thelma & Louise, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Dead Man Walking, which won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. She has also been active in humanitarian and political causes for decades.
Pedro J Pacheco · CC BY-SA 4.0
Rembrandt, the Dutch Golden Age painter and printmaker, died in Amsterdam. He is remembered for his portraits, roughly a hundred self-portraits that form an intimate autobiography, and his deeply human biblical scenes.
Rembrandt · Public domain
Planck was the German physicist who started quantum theory in 1900 by proposing that energy comes in discrete packets. He won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the Max Planck Society, renamed in his honour in 1948, still runs research institutes today.
Courtesy of the Clendening History of Medicine Library, University of Kansas Medical Center. · CC BY-SA 3.0
Janis Joplin was a powerhouse rock singer, famed for her raw mezzo-soprano voice and electric stage presence, and for fronting Big Brother and the Holding Company. She died in Los Angeles aged 27, from an overdose of heroin, leaving her album Pearl to become a hit afterwards.
Grossman Glotzer Management Corporation · Public domain
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