1966 – France conducts its first nuclear weapon test in the Pacific, on Moruroa Atoll.

1964 – Civil rights movement: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant to prohibit segregation in public places.

1890 – The U.S. Congress passes the Sherman Antitrust Act.

1979 – Sony introduces the Walkman.

1968 – The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons is signed in Washington, D.C., London and Moscow by sixty-two countries.

1963 – ZIP codes are introduced for United States mail.

1957 – The International Geophysical Year begins.

1881 – The world's first international telephone call is made between St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, and Calais, Maine, United States.

1874 – The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, the first commercially successful typewriter, goes on sale.

1858 – Joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's papers on evolution to the Linnean Society of London.

1770 – Lexell's Comet is seen closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of 0.0146 astronomical units (2,180,000 km; 1,360,000 mi).

1986 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states can outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults.

1966 – The National Organization for Women, the United States' largest feminist organization, is founded.

1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, takes place.

1908 – The Tunguska Event, the largest impact event on Earth in human recorded history, resulting in a massive explosion over Eastern Siberia.

1905 – Albert Einstein sends the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, in which he introduces special relativity, for publication in Annalen der Physik.

2007 – Apple Inc. releases its first mobile phone, the iPhone.

2006 – Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that President George W. Bush's plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law.

1974 – Mikhail Baryshnikov defects from the Soviet Union to Canada while on tour with the Kirov Ballet.

1971 – Prior to re-entry (following a record-setting stay aboard the Soviet Union's Salyut 1 space station), the crew capsule of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft depressurizes, killing the three cosmonauts on board. Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev are the first humans to die in space.