1. On this day In 1899: FC Barcelona Association football
club was founded.
2. On this day in 1929: U.S. Admiral Richard E. Byrd led the
first expedition to fly over the South Pole.
3. On this day in 1943: U.S. aircraft carrier Hornet
was launched.
4. On this day in 1944: The first surgery (on a human)
to correct blue baby syndrome was performed by Alfred Blalock and Vivien
Thomas.
5. On this day in 1961: Mercury-Atlas 5 Mission – Enos
the Chimp, a chimpanzee, was launched into space. It was unmanned spaceflight
of the Mercury program. The craft orbited the Earth twice and splashed down
about 320 km south of Bermuda. Enos the Chimp (died November 4, 1962) was the
second chimpanzee launched into space and the first chimpanzee to achieve Earth
orbit. Enos was brought from the Miami Rare Bird Farm on April 3, 1960.
6. On this day in 1965: The Canadian Space Agency launched
the satellite Alouette 2. It was a research satellite launched by a Thor Agena
rocket with Explorer 31 from the Western test range at Vandenberg AFB in
California. It was designed to explore the ionosphere.
7. On this day in 1972: Atari announced the release of
Pong, the first commercially successful video game.
8. On this day in 2012: New findings from MESSENGER, NASA's
space probe, indicated almost definitively, that the north pole of Mercury, the
closest planet to the Sun, has water ice buried beneath the surface.
9. On this day in 2012: A new species of freshwater
fish were discovered. The new species of darter fish, Etheostoma obama, were
named after U.S. President Barack Obama.
