• 1743 – King George II of England defeated the French at Dettingen, Bavaria, in the War of the Austrian Succession.
  • 1787 – Edward Gibbon completed “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It was published the following May.
  • 1801 – British forces defeated the French and took control of Cairo, Egypt.
  • 1847 – New York and Boston were linked by telegraph wires.
  • 1871 – The yen became the new form of currency in Japan.
    1885 – Chichester Bell and Charles S. Tainter applied for a patent for the gramophone. It was granted on May 4, 1886.
  • 1905 – The battleship Potemkin succumbed to a mutiny on the Black Sea.
  • 1918 – Two German pilots were saved by parachutes for the first time.
  • 1923 – Yugoslav Premier Nikola Pachitch was wounded by Serb attackers in Belgrade.
  • 1924 – Democrats offered Mrs. Leroy Springs for vice presidential nomination. She was the first woman considered for the job.
  • 1927 – The U.S. Marines adopted the English bulldog as their mascot.
  • 1929 – Scientists at Bell Laboratories in New York revealed a system for transmitting television pictures.
  • 1931 – Igor Sikorsky filed U.S. Patent 1,994,488, which marked the breakthrough in helicopter technology.
  • 1942 – The FBI announced the capture of eight Nazi saboteurs who had been put ashore from a submarine on New York’s Long Island.
  • 1944 – During World War II, American forces completed their capture of the French port of Cherbourg from the German army.
  • 1950 – Two days after North Korea invaded South Korea, U.S. President Truman ordered the Air Force and Navy into the Korean conflict. The United Nations Security Council had asked for member nations to help South Korea repel an invasion from the North.
  • 1954 – The world’s first atomic power station opened at Obninsk, near Moscow.
  • 1982 – Space Shuttle Columbia launched from the Kennedy Space Center on the final research and development flight mission, STS-4.
  • 1985 – The U.S. House of Representatives voted to limit the use of combat troops in Nicaragua.
  • 1986 – The World Court ruled that the U.S. had broken international law by aiding Nicaraguan rebels.
  • 1991 – Slovenia, after declaring independence two days before is invaded by Yugoslav troops, tanks, and aircraft starting the Ten-Day War.
  • 1995 – Qatar’s Crown Prince Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani ousted his father in a bloodless palace coup.
    2007 – Tony Blair resigns as British Prime Minister, a position he had held since 1997.
  • 2007 – The Brazilian Military Police invades the favelas of Complexo do Alemão in an episode which is remembered as the Complexo do Alemão massacre.
  • 2008 – In a highly scrutizined election President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabe is re-elected in a landslide after his opponent Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn a week earlier, citing violence against his party’s supporters.
  • 2013 – NASA launches the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, a space probe to observe the Sun.