On this day: August 6
The electric chair is used for the first time, a TV great and pop art legend share a birthday, America drops the A-bomb on Hiroshima and the country's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice is confirmed, all on this day.
1538: Bogota, Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a Spanish conquistador seeking the legendary golden city of El Dorado.
1538: Bogota, Colombia, is founded by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a Spanish conquistador seeking the legendary golden city of El Dorado.
1806: Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, abdicates his thrown, ending the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after the disastrous defeat of the a combined Russian-Austrian-British contingent by Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz.
1819: Norwich University is founded in Vermont as the first private military school in the United States. The school is recognized by the U.S. Department of Defense as the "birthplace of the ROTC."
1862: The Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is destroyed by her crew to prevent capture by Union forces on the Mississippi River after suffering damage in a battle with USS Essex near Baton Rouge, La.
1890: At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair. Kemmler was first electrocuted with 1,000 volts for 17 seconds, rendering him unconscious but failing to stop his heart or breathing. A second attempt with 2,000 volts was successful, but singed his hair and skin.
1890: Cy Young earns his first major league victory, winning in his debut for the Cleveland Spiders. He would accumulate 510 more over the course of his career.
1911: Actress Lucille Ball ("I Love Lucy," "The Lucy Show") is born in Jamestown, N.Y.
1917: Actor Robert Mitchum ("The Night of the Hunter," "Cape Fear") is born in Bridgeport, Conn.
1926: Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel. The 19-year-old completed the swim from Cape Gris-Nez in France to Kingsdown, Kent, England, in 14 hours and 39 minutes, beating the best time of the five men who had swum the channel before her by two hours. Her record for a female swimmer would stand until Florence Chadwick swam it in 13 hours and 20 minutes in 1950.
1928: Artist Andy Warhol, who would become a leading figure in the "pop art" movement and coin the term "15 minutes of fame," is born in Pittsburgh, Pa.
1945: Hiroshima is devastated when the atomic bomb "Little Boy" is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay near the end of World War II. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.
1959: Screenwriter and director Preston Sturges ("The Great McGinty," "Sullivan's Travels," "The Lady Eve") dies at age 60 in New York City.
1960: Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the nation. The United States responds by freezing all Cuban assets on American soil, severing diplomatic ties and tightening its embargo on Cuba, which is still in place today.
1960: Chubby Checker performs "The Twist" on American TV for the first time on "American Bandstand."
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, outlawing discriminatory voting practices based on race or color. The signing ceremony was attended by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders.
1965: The Beatles' album "Help!" is released in the United Kingdom.
1970: Film director M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense," "Signs") is born in Mahé, Pondicherry, India.
1973: Stevie Wonder is seriously injured in a car accident while on tour in North Carolina, when a car in which he was riding hit the back of a truck. The accident leaves him in a coma for four days and results in a partial loss of his sense of smell and a temporary loss of sense of taste.
1976: Actress Soleil Moon Frye, best known as TV's "Punky Brewster," is born in Glendora, Calif.
1982: Pink Floyd's "The Wall" has its U.S. premiere in New York City.
1991: Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee posts files describing his idea for the World Wide Web on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. The Web debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.
1996: NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, found in Antarctica in 1984 and thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms. Using a scanning electron microscope, scientists found what they believe are microscopic fossils of ancient Martian bacteria.
1997: Korean Air Flight 801, a Boeing 747-300, crashes into the jungle on Guam on approach to airport, killing 228.
1998: Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky testifies before independent counsel Kenneth Starr's grand jury for more than eight hours about her relationship with President Bill Clinton. She would return for more testimony on Aug. 20, 1998.
1999: "The Sixth Sense," starring Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment, debuts in theaters.
1999: Tony Gwynn of the San Diego Padres gets the 3,000th hit of his major league career with a single in the first inning off Montreal Expos pitcher Dan Smith. He has a total of four hits in the game.
2004: Musician Rick James ("Super Freak") dies from pulmonary and cardiac failure at age 56 in Burbank, Calif.
2009: Film director John Hughes ("Pretty in Pink," "The Breakfast Club," "Ferris Bueller's Day Off") dies from a heart attack at the age of 59 in New York City.
2009: Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed as the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice by a Senate vote of 68-31.
2011: A U.S. Boeing CH-47 Chinook military helicopter (similar to the one pictured) containing members of SEAL Team 6 is shot down in Afghanistan, killing 38, including 22 Navy SEALs. The 30 Americans killed in the crash makes it the largest single loss of U.S. life since the beginning of the 2001 Afghan War. It's also the largest single loss ever suffered by the SEALs.
