The Hubble Space Telescope, a sophisticated optical observatory built in the United States under the supervision of NASA, was placed into operation this day in 1990 by the crew of the space shuttle Discovery.
| 1926: | | | Giacomo Puccini's uncompleted opera Turandot was performed posthumously at La Scala under the direction of Arturo Toscanini. |
|
| 1915: | | The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed at Gallipoli in western Turkey during the Dardanelles Campaign of World War I. |
|
| 1874: | | | Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian physicist who invented a successful system of radio telegraphy (1896) and received the Nobel Prize for Physics (1909), was born. |
|
| 1809: | | The Treaty of Amritsar, which settled Indo-Sikh relations for a generation, was concluded between Charles T. Metcalfe, representing the British East India Company, and Ranjit Singh, head of the Sikh kingdom of Punjab. |
|
| 1792: | | The first guillotine was erected, on the Place de Grève in Paris, to execute a highwayman. |
|
| 1781: | | Petersburg, Virginia, was captured by British troops under William Phillips and Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution. |
|