1862 - Alvan Graham Clark discovers the white dwarf star Sirius B, a companion of Sirius, through an 18.5-inch (47 cm) telescope now located at Northwestern University.
1953 - North Sea flood of 1953 causes over 1,800 deaths in the Netherlands and over 300 in the United Kingdom.
1958 - The first successful launch of an American satellite.
1958 - James Van Allen discovers the Van Allen radiation belt.
1971 - Apollo 14; Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell, aboard a Saturn V lift off for a mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.

1861 - Kansas is admitted as the 34th U.S. state.
1964 Unmanned Apollo 1 Saturn launcher test attains Earth orbit
1966 Snow storm in north east US kills 165
1976 Zeiss planetarium in Hague destroyed by fire
1998 Thick Fog causes highway carnage in Belgium & Netherlands, 6 die
2014 Archaeologists discover the oldest Roman Temple (6th C BC) at Sant’Omobono

1820 - A Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev discovers the Antarctic continent approaching the Antarctic coast.
1821 - Alexander Island is first discovered by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen.
1878 1st telephone exchange (New Haven, CT)
1887 Work begins on the Eiffel Tower in Paris
1986 - Space Shuttle program, STS-51-L Mission: Space Shuttle Challenger breaks apart after liftoff killing all seven astronauts on board.

1500 - Vicente Yáñez Pinzón becomes the first European to set foot on Brazil.
1531 - Lisbon hit by Earthquake; about 30,000 die
1788 - Captain Arthur Phillip and British colonists hoist the Union Flag at Sydney Cove, New South Wales, now celebrated as Australia Day
1827 - Peru declared independence.
1837 - Michigan is admitted as the 26th U.S. state.
1905 - World's largest diamond, the 3,106-carat Cullinan, is found in South Africa
1915 - Rocky Mountain National Park is established by an act of the United States Congress.
1950 – India is formally declared as a Republic in British Comonvelt.
1978 - A rare severe blizzard with the lowest non-tropical atmospheric pressure ever recorded in the U.S. until October 2010, strikes the Ohio - Great Lakes region with heavy snow and winds up to 100 mph (161 km/h).

1348 - Friuli earthquake of 1348; a strong earthquake strikes the South Alpine region of Friuli in modern Italy, causing considerable damage to buildings as far away as Rome.

1554 - Founding of São Paulo city, Brazil.

1755 - Founding of the Moscow State University Lomonosv

1765 - Port Egmont, the first British settlement in the Falkland Islands at the southern tip of South America, is founded.

1915 - Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco.

1999 - Armenia, Colombia earthquake; a magnitude 6.0 earthquake hits western Colombia killing at least 1,000.