January 2
533: Mercurius becomes Pope John II, the first pope to adopt a new name upon ascending to the papacy.
1789: Georgia ratified the U.S. Constitution.
1900: The United States began trading with China.
1974: President Richard Nixon signed a bill lowering the maximum U.S. speed limit to 55 mph to conserve gasoline during an OPEC embargo.
1998: During a live show, Brazilian radio presenter Antario Teodoro Filho and a local politician were shot dead by a gunman who burst into the studio. Filho was hit by 10 bullets from two revolvers.
January 3
1496: Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tested a flying machine.
1957: The Hamilton Watch Co. introduced the first electric wristwatch.
1959: Alaska became the 49th U.S. state.
1961: A steam explosion and core meltdown at the SL-1, a government-run reactor near Idaho Falls, Idaho, killed three workers.
1962: Pope John XXIII excommunicated Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
1983: Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano began erupting continuously and has not stopped to date.
2000: The last original daily Peanuts comic strip was published.
January 4
1903: Topsy the circus elephant was electrocuted by Thomas Edison because the animal had become unpredictable and was considered a threat to humans.
1998: A massive ice storm hit eastern Canada and the northeastern United States. It continued through Jan. 10 and caused widespread destruction.
1999: Former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was sworn in as governor of Minnesota. Iron Eyes Cody, a U.S. actor who portrayed Native Americans in movies and TV from the 1930s to the 1970s, died in Hollywood at age 94. (Three years earlier, The New Orleans Times-Picayune had reported that his parents were immigrants from Sicily and that he had no Native American ancestry.)
January 5
1889: The term “Hamburger steak” first appeared in the Walla Walla Union newspaper in Walla Walla, Wash.
1914: The Ford Motor Company announced an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day’s labor.
1933: John Calvin Coolidge (30th U.S. president, 1923-1929) died in Northampton, Mass, at age 60.
1940: FM radio was demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission for the first time.
1972: President Richard Nixon ordered the development of the space shuttle program.
1974: The warmest reliably measured temperature in Antarctica, 59 degrees Fahrenheit, was recorded at Vanda Station.
1996: Opera singer Richard Versalle, 63, died onstage while performing Janacek’s The Makropulos Case at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, after delivering the line, “Too bad you can only live so long.”
January 6
1853: Benjamin Pierce—the 10-year-old son of President-elect Franklin A. Pierce (14th president, 1853-1857) and his wife Jane—was killed in a train wreck as the family was moving to Washington, D.C. (President-elect Pierce went alone to Washington and was inaugurated on March 3, but the inaugural ball was cancelled and national mourning was observed. President Pierce never recovered from his grief. He was totally ineffectual in office and is considered America’s most obscure president.)
1919: Theodore Roosevelt (26th U.S. president, 1901-1909) died at Oyster Bay, N.Y., at age 60.
1969: Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter (later president, 1976-1980) and 20 other people saw an unidentified flying object that hovered for 10 minutes over Leary, Georgia. Gov. Carter filed a detailed report of the sighting with the National Investigations Committee of Aerial Phenomena.
1800: 13th President Millard Fillmore was born in Cayuga County, New York. (Died 1874.)
1982: Faced with the rising price of copper, the U.S. Mint began issuing pennies made of copper-plated zinc.
1989: Japanese Emporer Hirohito died in Tokyo at age 87.
January 7
1782: The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opened in Philadelphia.
1927: The first transatlantic telephone service was established, between New York City and London, England.
1948: Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashed while in pursuit of a purported UFO.
1980: U.S. President Jimmy Carter authorized legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.
January 8
1790: George Washington delivered the first State of the Union address in New York, New York.
1815: Gen. Andrew Jackson (seventh president, 1829-1837) won the Battle of New Orleans against the British.
1835: The United States national debt was zero for the first and only time.
1889: Herman Hollerith was issued US patent #395,791 for the ‘Art of Applying Statistics,’ his punched card calculator.
1970: Actor George Ostroska dropped dead of a heart attack at the beginning of the second act while playing the lead in Macbeth in St. Paul, Minn. He was 32.
1994: Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on Soyuz TM-18 left for Mir. He stayed on the space station until March 22, 1995, for a record 437 days in space.