- 1850 Original Washington's farewell address manuscript sells for $2,300
- 1851 Edward Hargraves and three other men discover gold at Ophir, New South Wales, beginning Australia's first gold rush [1]
- 1877 First news dispatch by telephone between Boston and Salem, Massachusetts
- 1878 Harvard player Frederick Thayer patents baseball catcher's mask (pat # 200,358)
- 1879 First artificial ice rink in North America at Madison Square Garden, NYC
- 1941 First injection of penicillin into a patient by British physician Charles Fletcher at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, England
- 1947 Daytime fireball and meteorite fall seen in eastern Siberia
The New Look
1947 French fashion designer Christian Dior presents his first influential collection, named the "New Look"
- 1955 McGuire Sisters' "Sincerely" single goes to No. 1 and stays No. 1 for 10 weeks
- 1979 Kosmos 1076, the first Soviet oceanographic satellite, launches
Groundhog Day
1993 Comedy film "Groundhog Day" opens across the US starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, directed by Harold Ramis
- 2001 NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft lands in the saddle region of 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid
Meeting of Interest
2016 Pope Francis meets Patriarch Kirill in Havana in the first meeting between the heads of the Catholic and Russian Orthodox Churches in nearly 1,000 years
- 2019 NASA data shows the world has become 5% greener since the early 2000s, mostly due to tree planting in China and intensive farming in India
- 2019 Rare black panthers are spotted for the first time in nearly 100 years in Laikipia County, Kenya
- 2024 Oldest known 11,000 Stone Age megastructure, used for hunting, revealed submerged in Bay of Mecklenburg, off the German coast [1]
