TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2017 On this day in history:

1792 - In Vienna, 22-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven received one of his first lessons in music composition from Franz Joseph Haydn.

1800 - Washington, DC, was established as the capital of the United States.

1815 - Explorer James Kelly begins his circumnavigation of Tasmania.

1882 - Australia’s worst gold mining disaster, to date, occurs in Creswick, Victoria.

1896 - Guglielmo Marconi gave the first public demonstration of radio at Toynbee Hall, London.

1912 - The Mother’s Day International Association was incorporated with the purpose of furthering meaningful observations of Mother’s Day.

1915 - The first all-metal aircraft, the German Junkers J1, made its first flight.

1946 - A United Nations committee voted to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate to be the site of the UN’s headquarters. The land was offered as a gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

1955 - British engineer Christopher Cockerell patented the first hovercraft.

1963 - Kenya gained its independence from Britain. 1989 - Britain forcibly removed 51 Vietnamese from Hong Kong and returned them to their homeland.

1991 - At the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, the first web server outside of Europe was installed.

1994 - The Brazilian Supreme Court acquitted former President Fernando Collor de Mello of corruption charges that had forced him to resign in 1992.

1995 - Two French airmen shot down over Bosnia arrived home after almost four months of being held captive by the Bosnian Serbs.

1997 - Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the international terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal” went on trial in Paris on charges of killing two French investigators and a Lebanese national. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.