Today in History: Sports, TV, movies and more

1765 1st North American medical college opens in Philadelphia

1802 Washington, D.C. is incorporated as a city

1921 West Virginia imposes 1st state sales tax

1923 1st nonstop north American transcontinental flight (NY-San Diego) completed

1937 Margaret Mitchell wins Pulitzer Prize for “Gone With the Wind”

1942 Nazis require Dutch Jews to wear a Jewish star

1952 1st landing by an airplane at geographic North Pole

1960 The Anne Frank House opens in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

1965 1st use of satellite TV, Today Show on Early Bird Satellite

1971 “All Things Considered” premieres on 112 National Public Radio stations

1973 Chicago’s Sears Tower, world’s tallest building (443 m), topped out 1999 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma is slammed by an F5 tornado killing forty-two people, injuring 665, and causing $1 billion in damage. The tornado was one of 66 from the 1999 Oklahoma tornado outbreak.

1978 First unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (“spam”) is sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every ARPANET address on the US west coast

1999 The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 11,000 for the first time in its history at 11,014.70.

Sports

1936 NY Yankee Joe DiMaggio makes his major-league debut, gets 3 hits

1992 NY Met Eddie Murray is 24th to hit 400 HRs

1997 Garry Kasparov begins chess match with IBM supercomputer Deep Blue

2000 The sport of geocaching begins, with the first cache placed and the coordinates from a GPS posted on Usenet.

2018 Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan becomes NFL’s first $30m per season player after agreeing to $150m contract extension

TV & Movies

1944 “Going My Way”, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Bing Crosby premieres in New York (Best Picture 1945)

1948 1st broadcast of “CBS Evening News” - longest running network news show in the US

1991 356th & final episode of CBS second longest running series “Dallas”, (2nd only to “Gunsmoke”)

2002 “Spider-Man”, starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Willem Dafoe as Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin, premieres

2018 Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences members vote to expel Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski

Birthdays

1469 Niccolo Machiavelli, Italian politician and writer (Prince), born in Florence, Italy (d. 1527)

1898 Golda Meir [Mabovitch], Israeli teacher, stateswoman and 4th Prime Minister of Israel (1969-74) known as the “Iron Lady” of Israeli politics, born in Kiev, Ukraine (d. 1978)

1956 Akio Toyoda, Japanese president of Toyota Motor Corporation, born in Nagoya, Japan