1866 - Excelsior Needle Company began making sewing machine needles.
1901 - The first telegraph company in Hawaii opened.
1907 - In Hamburg, Germany, dock workers went on strike after the end of the night shift. British strike breakers were brought in. The issue was settled on April 22, 1907.
1908 - In Paris, Gabriel Lippmann introduced three-dimensional color photography at the Academy of Sciences.
1911 - Maurice Maeterlinck's "The Bluebird" opened in Paris.
1917 - The Russian Revolution began with Czar Nicholas II abdicating.
1933 - The motion picture King Kong had its world premiere in New York.
1946 - Ho Chi Minh was elected President of Vietnam.
1949 - The B-50 Superfortress Lucky Lady II landed in Fort Worth, TX. The American plane had completed the first non-stop around-the-world flight.
1969 - In Toulouse, France, the supersonic transport Concorde made its first test flight.
1989 - Representatives from the 12 European Community nations all agreed to ban all production of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) by the end of the 20th century.
1995 - Russian anti-corruption journalist Vladislav Listyev was killed by a gunman in Moscow.
1995 - Nick Leeson was arrested for his role in the collapse of Britain's Barings Bank.
1998 - Images from the American spacecraft Galileo indicated that the Jupiter moon Europa has a liquid ocean and a source of interior heat.
2004 - NASA announced that the Mars rover Opportunity had discovered evidence that water had existed on Mars in the past.