On this date:
In 1777, Gen. George Washington’s troops launched an assault on the British at Germantown, Pennsylvania, resulting in heavy American casualties.
In 1822, the 19th president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, was born in Delaware, Ohio.
In 1931, the comic strip “Dick Tracy,” created by Chester Gould, made its debut.
In 1940, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini conferred at Brenner Pass in the Alps.
In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit. The television series “Leave It to Beaver” premiered on CBS.
In 1959, the Soviet Union launched Luna 3, a space probe which transmitted images of the far side of the moon.
In 1960, an Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-188A Electra crashed on takeoff from Boston’s Logan International Airport, killing all but 10 of the 72 people on board.
In 1966, the African kingdom of Lesotho (leh-SOO’-too) gained its independence from Britain.
In 1970, rock singer Janis Joplin, 27, was found dead in her Hollywood hotel room.
In 1985, Islamic Jihad issued a statement saying it had killed American hostage William Buckley. (Fellow hostage David Jacobsen later said he believed Buckley had died of torture injuries four months earlier.)
In 1990, for the first time in nearly six decades, German lawmakers met in the Reichstag for the first meeting of reunified Germany’s parliament.
In 1991, 26 nations, including the United States, signed the Madrid Protocol, which imposed a 50-year ban on oil exploration and mining in Antarctica.
Ten years ago: The domain name wikileaks.org was registered (the website began publishing leaked classified information in Dec. 2006). Ousted Hewlett-Packard Chairwoman Patricia Dunn, a company officer and three investigators were charged with violating California privacy laws in a corporate spying scandal. (The charges were later dropped, with a judge calling their conduct a “betrayal of trust and honor” that nonetheless did not rise to the level of criminal activity.) American Roger D. Kornberg won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. New York Times correspondent R.W. Apple Jr. died in Washington at age 71.
Five years ago: Three U.S.-born scientists, Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess, won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. The NBA canceled the entire 114-game preseason schedule because a new collective bargaining agreement had not been reached with the National Basketball Players Association.