1836 Spain recognises the independence of Mexico.
1869 William Finley Semple from Ohio receives a patent for chewing gum.
1895 The Lumière brothers screen the first motion picture in Paris, which lasts one minute.
1904 A weather forecast is published for the first time in a London newspaper.
1908 The most destructive earthquake in European history takes place. The epicentre is the Strait of Messina in southern Italy, and it devastates the city of Messina in Sicily and Reggio Calabria on the mainland, killing 100,000 people.
1935 Pravda publishes a letter by senior party official Pavel Postyshev calling for the restoration of Christmas traditions in the Soviet Union.
1949 Jolie Bellin accidentally drops a lamp containing turpentine onto her clothes and discovers dry cleaning.
1955 Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo is born; he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.
1973 Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn publishes his masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago.
1922 The last President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, describes the dissolution of the Soviet Union as a tragic mistake.
1993 A British scientist states that the Loch Ness monster in Scotland may be a giant Baltic sturgeon.
1996 In Cyprus, according to demographic data, the population in the free areas amounts to 645,300 people.
1997 Denktaş confirms the decision to suspend intercommunal talks on behalf of the Turkish Cypriot side, placing the blame on the European Union and the start of accession negotiations.
This article was originally published on Polignosi.