1455 – The Yorkists defeated King Henry VI’s Lancastrian forces at St. Albans, north of London, in the first battle of the War of the Roses.
1761 – The first life insurance policy was issued in the United States by the Corporation for the Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers and of the Poor and Distressed Widows and Children of Presbyterian Ministers.
1813 – Composer Wilhelm Richard Wagner (Tristan, Isolde, Lohengrin) was bornin Leipzig, Germany.
1819 – The steamship Savannah became the first to cross the Atlantic, sailing from Savannah, Georgia to Liverpool, England. This day is now celebrated in the United States as National Maritime Day.
1843 – A wagon train of 1,000 settlers and 1,000 heads of cattle set off on the “Oregon Trail” from Independence, MO, in what became known as the “Great Migration.”
1849 – Abraham Lincoln received patent number 6469 for his floating dry dock.
1859 – Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes series) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1868 – The masked Reno Gang pulled off the “great train robbery” at Marshfield, IN, hauling away $98,000.
1900 – Edwin S. Votey of Detroit, MI patented his pianola: a pneumatic piano player, which could be attached to any piano.
1907 – Actor Laurence Olivier (War Requiem, The Boys from Brazil, Brideshead Revisited, Carrie, The Jazz Singer, Peter the Great, Richard III, Spartacus) was born in Surrey, England.
1960 – A 9.5-magnitude earthquake, the largest ever recorded, struck coastal Chile, killing 1,655 people and leaving more than 2,000,000 homeless. It also generated a massive series of tsunamis across the Pacific region that killed more than 2,000 more people.
1967 – What was to become the Public Broadcasting System’s longest-running children’s program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, debuted.
1972 – President Richard M. Nixon became the first U.S. president to visit Moscow.
1992 – After 3 decades, Johnny Carson hosted The Tonight Show for the last time. Comedian Jay Leno replaced him.
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