Today in History

Three Soviet cosmonauts die when their spacecraft depressurizes during reentry.

Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Psycho, opens.

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley demonstrate their invention, the transistor, for the first time.

Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone With the Wind, is published.

Adolf Hitler orders the purge of his own party in the “Night of the Long Knives.”

Mongo Beti, novelist and political writer.

Paul Berg, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist.

Susan Hayward, actress.

Lena Horne, American singer.

Czeslaw Milosz, Polish poet and critic.

A mysterious explosion, possibly the result of a meteorite, levels thousands of trees in the Tunguska region of Siberia with a force approaching twenty megatons.

Jean Francois Gravelet aka Emile Blondin, a French daredevil, becomes the first man to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

Charles Dickens reads from A Christmas Carol at St. Martin’s Hall in London–his first public reading.

Elizabeth Kortright, later Elizabeth Monroe, first lady to U.S. President James Monroe.

John Gay, poet and playwright (The Beggar’s Opera).

Montezuma II is murdered as Spanish conquistadors flee the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan during the night.