2009—While giving a TED Talk on malaria prevention at Long Beach, Calif., Bill Gates releases a jarful of mosquitoes to feast on the audience.
1982—Phoenix, Ariz. resident David Grundman is killed when the 26-foot, 500 lb. saguaro he shot falls on him.
1976—Lockheed admits to paying $22 million in bribes to sell aircraft.
1974—William Randolph Hearst’s granddaughter Patty, 19, is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
1968—Ur-beat Neal Cassady, 41, dies alongside railroad tracks in Mexico.
1968—Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown, is declared a free-fire zone; South Vietnamese pilots bomb their own capitol.
1913—Rosa Louise McCauley Parks is born in Tuskegee, Ala.
1912—Franz Reichelt’s parachute/overcoat fails the Eiffel Tower test.
1899—Five months after being liberated from Spaniards by Americans, Filipinos begin fighting the liberators.
1887—The ICC is established. A future Union Pacific president calls it “quite harmless…[it] will impress the popular mind with the idea that a great deal is being done, when, in reality, very little is intended to be done.”
1875—Pioneering photog Eadweard Muybridge, who shot Major Harry Larkyns dead for impregnating his wife, is found not guilty; Calif. jurymen say they’d have done the same. It’s the last time that works in the U.S.
1794—Congress gives enslavers the right to re-enslave people who escape.