January 7 - Events

Events

• 1325 – Alfonso IV becomes King of Portugal.
• 1558 – France takes Calais, the last continental possession of England.
• 1598 – Boris Godunov becomes Czar of Russia.
• 1608 – Fire destroys Jamestown, Virginia.
• 1610 – Galileo Galilei makes his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa, although he is not able distinguish the last two until the following day.
• 1782 – The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opens.
• 1785 – Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
• 1797 – The modern Italian flag is first used.
• 1835 – HMS Beagle drops anchor off the Chonos Archipelago.
• 1894 – William Kennedy Dickson receives a patent for motion picture film.
• 1904 – The distress signal "CQD" is established only to be replaced two years later by "SOS".
• 1919 – Montenegrin guerrilla fighters rebel against the planned annexation of Montenegro by Serbia, but fail.
• 1920 – The New York State Assembly refuses to seat five duly elected Socialist assemblymen.
• 1922 – Dáil Éireann ratifies the Anglo-Irish Treaty by a 64-57 vote.
• 1927 – The first transatlantic telephone service is established – from New York, New York to London, England, United Kingdom.
• 1931 – Guy Menzies flies the first solo non-stop trans-Tasman flight (from Australia to New Zealand) in 11 hours and 45 minutes, crash-landing on New Zealand's west coast.
• 1935 – Benito Mussolini and French Foreign minister Pierre Laval sign the Franco-Italian Agreement.
• 1940 – Winter War: The Finnish 9th Division stops and completely destroys the overwhelming Soviet forces on the Raate-Suomussalmi road.
• 1942 – World War II: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.
• 1945 – World War II: British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.
• 1948 – Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashes while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.
• 1954 – Georgetown-IBM experiment: the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
• 1959 – The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
• 1960 – The Polaris missile is test launched.
• 1968 – Surveyor Program: Surveyor 7, the last spacecraft in the Surveyor series, lifts off from launch complex 36A, Cape Canaveral.
• 1973 – Mark Essex fatally shoots 10 people and wounds 13 others at Howard Johnson's Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana, before being shot to death by police officers.
• 1979 – Third Indochina War – Cambodian–Vietnamese War: Phnom Penh falls to the advancing Vietnamese troops, driving out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
• 1980 – President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.
• 1984 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
• 1985 – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency launches Sakigake, Japan's first interplanetary spacecraft and the first deep space probe to be launched by any country other than the United States or the Soviet Union.
• 1989 – Prince Akihito is sworn in as the emperor of Japan after the death of his father Hirohito
• 1990 – The interior of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to the public because of safety concerns.
• 1991 – Roger Lafontant, former leader of the Tonton Macoutes in Haiti under François Duvalier, attempts a coup d'état, which ends in his arrest.
• 1993 – The Fourth Republic of Ghana is inaugurated with Jerry Rawlings as President.
• 1993 – Bosnian War: The Bosnian Army executes a surprise attack on the village of Kravica in Srebrenica.
• 1999 – The Senate trial in the impeachment of U.S. President Bill Clinton begins.
• 2010 – Muslim gunmen in Egypt open fire on a crowd of Coptic Christians leaving church after celebrating a midnight Christmas mass, killing eight of them as well as one Muslim bystander.