1785 – Artist and ornithologist John James Audubon was born in Santo Domingo, now Haiti.
1803 – Between 2,000 and 3,000 meteorite stones, some weighing up to 20 pounds, rained down on L’Aigle in northeastern France. The meteorites poured down along an 8-mile-long strip in this town, 100 miles west of Paris. No one was hurt, but it was the first time scientists could verify that stones could come from outer space.
1865 – John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, was killed after Union troops tracked him to a Virginia farm.
1888 – Author – playwright Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, I Married an Angel, San Francisco, Saratoga, The Women) was born in Sissons, CA.
1900 – Seismologist Charles Francis Richter, inventor of the Richter scale for measuring the magnitude of earthquakes, was born in Hamilton, OH.
1921 – Weather broadcasts were heard for the first time on radio when WEW in St. Louis, MO, aired weather news.
1983 – For the first time, the Dow Jones industrial average moved over the 1200 mark, just two months after smashing the 1100 barrier.
1986 – In Pripyat, Ukraine, the Chernobyl atomic power station exploded in the worst nuclear accident in world history. At least 31 people are known to have died immediately from the blast, but estimates put the final death toll in the thousands. About 70,000 more were exposed to the radioactive material, as some 150,000 others had to be permanently relocated.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vMTdSAm1w&feature=related
Chief Writing Wolf 