1956 – The Million Dollar Quartet (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash) get together at Sun Studio for the first and last time.

1992 – A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world's first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

1973 – Pioneer program: Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.

1970 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency begins operations.

1942 – World War II: During the Manhattan Project, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

1845 – Manifest destiny: In a State of the Union message, U.S. President James K. Polk proposes that the United States should aggressively expand into the West.

 Red_Dragon wrote: 
a good point of reference and great reminder that we've come a long way

1955 – American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to that city's bus boycott.

1999 – British Aerospace and Marconi Electronic Systems merge to form BAE Systems, Europe's largest defense contractor and the fourth largest aerospace firm in the world.

1999 – Exxon and Mobil sign a US$73.7 billion agreement to merge, thus creating ExxonMobil, the world's largest company.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

Yes, he played the "Julius F. Kelp/Buddy Love" character in the very first stage production of "The Nutty Professor".

1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

1991 – Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury announces in a statement that he is HIV-positive. He dies the following day.

1963 – The BBC broadcasts An Unearthly Child (starring William Hartnell), the first episode of the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, 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.

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.

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