1997 – In Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, representatives from 121 countries sign the Ottawa Treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines. The United States, People's Republic of China, and Russia do not sign the treaty, however.

1992 – A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world's first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

1984 – Bhopal disaster: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom later died from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

1979 – Iranian Revolution: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini becomes the first Supreme Leader of Iran.

1967 – At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, a transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).

1970 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency begins operations.

1942 – World War II: During the Manhattan Project, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

2020 – The Arecibo Telescope collapsed.

2019 – The outbreak of coronavirus infection began in Wuhan.

1955 – American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to that city's bus boycott.

1952 – The New York Daily News reports the news of Christine Jorgensen, the first notable case of sex reassignment surgery.

1999 – Exxon and Mobil sign a US$73.7 billion agreement to merge, thus creating ExxonMobil, the world's largest company.

Today in history I sold the very first "EVERYBODY GO INSIDE - HERE COMES A HABOOB!" t-shirt. Many (many) years after designing it.
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-...

2004 – The last Poʻouli (Black-faced honeycreeper) dies of avian malaria in the Maui Bird Conservation Center in Olinda, Hawaii, before it could breed, making the species in all probability extinct.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

Today, I heard on NPR that M Pox evolved from ceasing vaccination against small pox in 1980.   

1947 – Red Scare: The "Hollywood Ten" are blacklisted by Hollywood movie studios.

1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed "Lucy" (after The Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.

1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.

2015 – Blue Origin's New Shepard space vehicle became the first rocket to successfully fly to space and then return to Earth for a controlled, vertical landing.

1992 – The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.