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.

2020 – The Arecibo Telescope collapsed.

2019 – The outbreak of coronavirus infection began in Wuhan.

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.

1952 – The New York Daily News reports the news of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sex reassignment surgery.

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

Today in history I sold the very first "EVERYBODY GO INSIDE - HERE COMES A HABOOB!" t-shirt. Many (many) years after designing it.
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-...

2004 – The last Poʻouli (Black-faced honeycreeper) dies of avian malaria in the Maui Bird Conservation Center in Olinda, Hawaii, before it could breed, making the species in all probability extinct.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

Today, I heard on NPR that M Pox evolved from ceasing vaccination against small pox in 1980.   

1947 – Red Scare: The "Hollywood Ten" are blacklisted by Hollywood movie studios.

1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed "Lucy" (after The Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.

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.

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.

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

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.