TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2018 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.

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.

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. Birthdays

Gustave Flaubert 1821 Edvard Munch 1863 Norwegian artist Edward G. Robinson 1893 Robert Covington 1914 Frank Sinatra 1915

Joe Williams 1918

Bob Barker 1923

Ed Koch 1924

Robert N. Noyce 1927 Connie Francis 1938 Dionne Warwick 1940 Mike Pinder (Moody Blues) 1942

Grover Washington Jr. 1943 Dickey Betts (The Allman Brothers) 1943

Wings Hauser 1947

Paul Rodgers (Bad Company) 1949