- 1583 Richard Martin of London takes out the first life insurance policy, on William Gibbons; the premium is £383
Susan B. Anthony Fined for Voting
1873 Susan B. Anthony is fined $100 ($2,200 in 2020 value) for voting for US President in Rochester, New York; she refuses to pay, and no further action against her is taken
- 1892 Brothers Edward and Robert Jordan plant 1st Macadamia nuts in Oahu, Hawaii
- 1898 Steel Pier opens as the first amusement pier in Atlantic City, New Jersey [1]
- 1936 First bicycle traffic court in America established in Racine, Wisconsin
- 1959 Governor of Louisiana Earl K. Long is committed to a state mental hospital; he responds by having the hospital's director fired and replaced with a crony who proceeds to proclaim him perfectly sane
- 1977 Space Shuttle test model "Enterprise" carries a crew aloft for 1st time, it was fixed to a modified Boeing 747
The Human Computer
1980 Indian "human computer" Shakuntala Devi sets a world record by mentally multiplying two random 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds; She correctly answered that 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 = 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 !
1st US Woman in Space
1983 Space shuttle Challenger 2 launches the first American woman into space, astronaut Sally Ride
- 2020 World record for greatest duration for a single lighting flash of 17.1 seconds during thunderstorm over Uruguay and Argentina according to World Meteorological Organization [1]
- 2024 Rema’s "Calm Down", already the most successful African song, becomes the first Afrobeats single to earn over 1 billion on-demand streams in the US [1]
