- 3 Conjunction of Venus and Jupiter on August 12, 3 BC, a popular theory for the biblical "Star of Bethlehem"
Singer Sewing Machine
1851 American inventor Isaac Singer patents his famous sewing machine
1877 To his amazement, Thomas Edison records himself reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on his newly completed cylinder phonograph, a device that records sound onto tinfoil cylinders [1]
1908 Ford Motor Company builds its first Model T car, which Henry Ford himself tests on a hunting trip to Wisconsin and northern Michigan [1]
- 1923 Enrico Tiraboschi (36) of Argentina is the first to swim the English Channel from France to England
Wings
1927 Silent film "Wings," starring Clara Bow and directed by William A. Wellman, premieres in NY as the first film and one of only two silent films to win an Academy Award for Best Picture
- 1953 Ann Davison arrives in Miami in her 23-foot boat Felicity Ann, becoming the first woman to sail solo across the Atlantic
- 1972 Ian and Greg Chappell both score centuries in the same Test cricket innings
- 1980 Nicaragua celebrates the end of its National Literacy Crusade, a massive effort over five months that reduces illiteracy from 50% to 12%
- 1981 American swimmer Jon Erikson becomes the first to complete a three-way crossing of the English Channel in 38 hours and 27 minutes [1]
IBM Personal Computer
1981 Don Estridge unveils the company's first personal computer, the IBM PC, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, priced at $1,565 with 16 kilobytes of RAM, helping bring computing to the masses [1]
- 1990 Longest baseball rain delay in MLB history as the Texas Rangers and Chicago White Sox wait 7 hours and 23 minutes at Comiskey Park in Chicago until the game is eventually postponed
Second Elvis Stamp
2015 US Postal Service issues a second postage stamp featuring rock singer Elvis Presley as part of its Music Icon series; the design is a black and white photograph taken by William Speer in 1955
- 2018 NASA launches the Parker Solar Probe, its first mission to the Sun and its outermost atmosphere, the corona
- 2021 Bennu Asteroid, the size of the Empire State Building, now has a 1-in-1,750 chance of hitting Earth in 2182 according to data from NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft [1]
