Today:
1715 – King Louis XIV of France died at the Palace of Versailles after a reign of more than 72 years, one of the longest reigns of any monarch in recorded history. His five-year-old great-grandson succeeded him as Louis XV.
1804 – German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding discovered Juno, the third asteroid to be discovered, while observing from the Lilienthal Observatory near Bremen.
1878 – Emma Nutt became the world’s first female telephone operator when she began working for the Edwin Holmes Telephone Dispatch Company in Boston. She reportedly remained a telephone operator for more than 30 years.
1897 – The first section of Boston’s Tremont Street subway opened to the public. It was the first subway tunnel in North America and eventually became part of today’s MBTA Green Line.
1914 – Martha, the last known passenger pigeon, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Passenger pigeons had once existed in North America in flocks numbering in the millions—or even billions—before hunting and habitat destruction drove the species to extinction.
1939 – Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II in Europe. Britain and France declared war on Germany two days later.
1952 – Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea was first published in Life magazine. The novella helped restore Hemingway’s literary reputation and contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature two years later.
1969 – A military coup led by Muammar Gaddafi overthrew King Idris of Libya. Gaddafi would dominate Libya’s government for the next 42 years.
1985 – The wreck of the RMS Titanic was discovered on the floor of the North Atlantic by a joint American-French expedition led by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, 73 years after the ship sank.
2004 – Chechen militants seized School Number One in Beslan, Russia, taking more than 1,100 people hostage, including hundreds of children. The three-day siege ended in violence that killed more than 330 hostages.