Dec 9 in History

1531 — The Virgin of Guadalupe first appears to peasant Juan Diego in Tepeyac, Mexico City.

1608 — English blind poet (“Paradise Lost”) and polemicist John Milton is born in London. Totally blind by age 44, he writes in English, Latin, Greek and Italian. “Areopagitica” (1644), a condemnation of censorship, is one of the most influential defences of free speech and freedom of the press in history.

1894 — Jules Regnault, 60, French economist, dies in Paris. A stock broker’s assistant, he first suggested a modern theory of stock price changes (“the deviation of prices is directly proportional to the square root of time”) in 1863.

1916 — Kirk Douglas, actor best known for “Spartacus”, is born as Issur Danielovitch Demsky in Amsterdam, New York, US.

1934 — Judi Dench, M in seven James Bond movies — “GoldenEye” (1995) to “Skyfall” (2012) — is born in York, England.

1960 — The first episode of “Coronation Street”, the world’s longest-running soap opera, airs on ITV.

1967 — Nicolae Ceausescu becomes president of Romania, the second and last communist leader. 1968 — Douglas Engelbart first demonstrates in San Francisco the mouse and almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing developed at his Augmentation Research Center: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. 1979 — The global eradication of smallpox is certified by a commission of eminent scientists and endorsed by the World Health Assembly on May 8 1980. The earliest evidence of the highly contagious disease dates back to the 3rd century BC in Egyptian mummies. As recently as 1967, 15-million cases occurred a year. Rinderpest (certified in 2011) becomes the second disease driven to extinction. 1990 — In Albania, demonstrating Tirana University students call for the dictatorship to end, following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989. Head of State Ramiz Alia meets the students four days later; a multiparty system is introduced; the first opposition party is established.

1990 — Lech Walesa, founder of Solidarity, becomes Poland’s first freely-elected head of state in 63 years and the first non-communist in 45 years.

1996 — Gwen Jacob is acquitted by the Ontario Court of Appeal on charges of indecency on the basis that being topless is not a sexual act or indecent. On July 19 1991, a hot (33°C) and humid day, the then 19-year-old student was arrested after removing her shirt on a street in Guelph. Her acquittal brings about women’s right to be topfree in Ontario, Canada.