1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.

1859 – British naturalist Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is published.

2015 – Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle became the first rocket to successfully fly to space and then return to Earth for a controlled, vertical landing.

1992 – The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

1963 – The first episode of Doctor Who ("An Unearthly Child") is broadcast by the BBC, which is now the world's longest running science fiction drama.

1924 – Edwin Hubble's discovery, that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times.

534 BC – Thespis of Icaria becomes the first recorded actor to portray a character on stage.

1987 – The Max Headroom signal hijacking incident takes place, in which a pirate broadcast interrupts television broadcasts in Chicago.

1963 – U.S. President John F. Kennedy is assassinated

1969 – The first permanent ARPANET link is established between UCLA and SRI.

1959 – American disc jockey Alan Freed, who had popularized the term "rock and roll" and music of that style, is fired from WABC radio over allegations he had participated in the payola scandal.

1905 – Albert Einstein's paper that leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula, E = mc², is published in the journal Annalen der Physik.

1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

1676 – The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer presents the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light.

1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0, the first graphical personal computer operating environment developed by Microsoft, is released.

1945 – Nuremberg trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.

1820 – An 80-ton sperm whale attacks and sinks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) from the western coast of South America. (Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick was in part inspired by this incident.)

1805 – Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, premieres in Vienna.

1985 – The first comic of Calvin and Hobbes is published in ten newspapers.

1928 – Release of the animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon.