Today:
1422 – King Henry V of England died unexpectedly at the Château de Vincennes near Paris at age 35. His nine-month-old son succeeded him as Henry VI.
1888 – The body of Mary Ann Nichols was discovered in London’s Whitechapel district. She is generally considered the first of the five “canonical” victims attributed to the unidentified serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.
1897 – Thomas Edison received a U.S. patent for his Kinetographic Camera, an important early motion-picture camera system developed at his laboratory.
1935 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the first Neutrality Act, intended to keep the United States from becoming involved in foreign wars as tensions increased in Europe.
1939 – Nazi Germany staged the Gleiwitz incident, a fake Polish attack on a German radio station. The operation was used as propaganda to help justify Germany’s invasion of Poland the following day and the beginning of World War II in Europe.
1955 – William G. Cobb of General Motors publicly demonstrated the Sunmobile, a tiny experimental automobile powered by solar energy, at the General Motors Powerama exhibition in Chicago.
1962 – Trinidad and Tobago gained independence from the United Kingdom after more than 160 years of British rule.
1980 – Poland’s communist government and striking workers at the Gdańsk Shipyard signed the Gdańsk Agreement. It permitted independent trade unions and led to the creation of the Solidarity movement led by Lech Wałęsa.
1997 – Diana, Princess of Wales, died at age 36 after a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris. Her death prompted an extraordinary worldwide outpouring of grief.
2006 – Norwegian police recovered Edvard Munch’s paintings The Scream and Madonna, which had been stolen at gunpoint from Oslo’s Munch Museum two years earlier.