January 301649 - England's King Charles I was beheaded. 1790 - The first purpose-built lifeboat was launched on the River Tyne. 1798 - The first brawl in the U.S. House of Representatives took place. Congressmen Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold fought on the House floor. 1844 - Richard Theodore Greener became the first African American to graduate from Harvard University. 1847 - The town of Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco. 1862 - The U.S. Navy's first ironclad warship, the "Monitor", was launched. 1889 - Rudolph, crown prince of Austria, and his 17-year-old mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, were found shot in his hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna. 1894 - C.B. King received a patent for the pneumatic hammer. 1900 - The British fighting the Boers in South Africa ask for a larger army. 1910 - Work began on the first board-track automobile speedway. The track was built in Playa del Ray, CA. 1911 - The first airplane rescue at sea was made by the destroyer "Terry." Pilot James McCurdy was forced to land in the ocean about 10 miles from Havana, Cuba. 1933 - "The Lone Ranger" was heard on radio for the first time. The program ran for 2,956 episodes and ended in 1955. 1933 - Adolf Hitler was named the German Chancellor. 1948 - Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu extremist. 1950 - NBC-TV debuted "Robert Montgomery Presents." The show lasted for seven seasons. 1958 - Yves Saint Laurent, at age 22, held his first major fashion show in Paris. 1958 - The first two-way moving sidewalk was put in service at Love Field in Dallas, TX. The length of the walkway through the airport was 1,435 feet. 1960 - The women’s singles U.S. figure skating championship was won by Carol Heiss. 1962 - Two members of the "Flying Wallendas" high-wire act were killed when their seven-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit, MI. 1964 - January 30 - The U.S. launched Ranger 6. The unmanned spacecraft carried television cameras and was intentionally crash-landed on the moon. The cameras did not return any pictures to Earth. 1968 - The Tet Offensive began as Communist forces launched surprise attacks against South Vietnamese provincial capitals. 1972 - In Northern Ireland, British soldiers shot and killed thirteen Roman Catholic civil rights marchers. The day is known as "Bloody Sunday." 1979 - The civilian government of Iran announced it had decided to allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to return. He had been living in exile in France. 1989 - The U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan was closed. 1994 - Peter Leko became the world's youngest-ever grand master in chess. 1995 - The U.N. Security Council authorized the deployment of a 6,000-member U.N. peace-keeping contingent to assume security responsibilities in Haiti from U.S. forces. 1995 - Researchers from the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced that clinical trials had demonstrated the effectiveness of the first preventative treatment for sickle cell anemia. 1996 - Gino Gallagher, the reputed leader of the Irish National Liberation Army, was shot and killed as he queued for his unemployment benefit. 1997 - A New Jersey judge ruled that the unborn child of a female prisoner must have legal representation. He denied the prisoner bail reduction to enable her to leave the jail and obtain an abortion. 2002 - Slobodan Milosevic accused the U.N. war crimes tribunal of an "evil and hostile attack" against him. Milosevic was defending his actions during the Balkan wars. 2002 - Japan's last coal mine was closed. The closures were due to high production costs and cheap imports. 2005 - In Iraq, the first free Parliamentary elections since 1958 took place. 2017 - In China, scientist revealed 540-million-year-old Saccorhytus in a fossil. The actual creature would have been about a millimeter in size. |