15 Dey 1403

Events

• 1762 (264 years ago) Great Britain declares war on Spain, which meant the entry of Spain into the Seven Years' War.
• 1944 (82 years ago) World War II: Operation Carpetbagger, involving the dropping of arms and supplies to resistance fighters in Europe, begins.
• 1948 (78 years ago) Burma gains its independence from the United Kingdom, becoming an independent republic.
• 1951 (75 years ago) Korean War: Chinese and North Korean forces capture Seoul for the second time.
• 1958 (68 years ago) Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, falls to Earth from orbit.
• 1959 (67 years ago) Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.
• 2004 (22 years ago) Spirit, a NASA Mars rover, lands successfully on Mars at 04:35 UTC.
• 2008 (18 years ago) A Let L-410 Turbolet crashes in the Los Roques Archipelago in Venezuela, killing 14 people.

Births

• 1710 (316 years ago) Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Italian composer, violinist, and organist (died 1736)
• 1785 (241 years ago) Jacob Grimm, German philologist and mythologist (died 1863)
• 1809 (217 years ago) Louis Braille, French educator, invented Braille (died 1852)
• 1940 (86 years ago) Gao Xingjian, Chinese novelist, playwright, and critic, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1940 (86 years ago) Brian Josephson, Welsh physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
• 1963 (63 years ago) Till Lindemann, German singer, songwriter, and poet
• 1986 (40 years ago) James Milner, English footballer
• 1990 (36 years ago) Toni Kroos, German footballer

Deaths

• 1786 (240 years ago) Moses Mendelssohn, German philosopher and theologian (born 1729)
• 1877 (149 years ago) Cornelius Vanderbilt, American businessman and philanthropist (born 1794)
• 1920 (106 years ago) Benito Pérez Galdós, Spanish author and playwright (born 1843)
• 1941 (85 years ago) Henri Bergson, French philosopher and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1859)
• 1960 (66 years ago) Albert Camus, French novelist, philosopher, and journalist, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1913)
• 1961 (65 years ago) Erwin Schrödinger, Austrian physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1887)
• 1965 (61 years ago) T. S. Eliot, American-English poet, playwright, and critic, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1888)
• 2024 (2 years ago) Glynis Johns, British actress and singer (born 1923)

All 341 events, births and deaths of January 4