TODAY IN HISTORY

1789: America’s first inaugural ball was held in New York in honor of President George Washington, who had taken the oath of office a week earlier. 1889: The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore opened its doors.

1915: A German U-boat torpedoed and sank the British liner RMS Lusitania off the southern coast of Ireland, killing 1,198 people, including 128 Americans, out of the nearly 2,000 on board.

1928: The minimum voting age for British women was lowered from 30 to 21: the same age as men.

1939: Germany and Italy announced a military and political alliance known as the Rome-Berlin Axis. 1945: Germany signed an unconditional surrender at Allied headquarters in Rheims, France, ending its role in World War II. 1946: Sony Corp. had its beginnings as the Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp. was founded in the Japanese capital by Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka. 1954: The 55-day Battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam ended with Vietnamese insurgents overrunning French forces.

1963: The United States launched the Telstar 2 communications satellite.

1975: President Gerald R. Ford formally declared an end to the “Vietnam era.” In Ho Chi Minh City: formerly Saigon: the Viet Cong celebrated its takeover.

1992: The latest addition to America’s space shuttle fleet, Endeavour, went on its first flight.

2004: Army Pfc. Lynndie England, shown in photographs smiling and pointing at naked Iraqi prisoners, was charged by the military with assaulting the detainees and conspiring to mistreat them. (England was later convicted of conspiracy, mistreating detainees and committing an indecent act, and sentenced to 36 months; she served half that term.)

2010: A BP-chartered vessel lowered a 100ton concrete-and-steel vault onto the ruptured Deepwater Horizon well in an unprecedented, and ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to stop most of the gushing crude fouling the sea. Before a record hockey crowd of 77,803, the United States lost to host Germany 2-1 in the opening game of the world ice hockey championships.