- 1859 – British and French engineers break ground for the Suez Canal.
- 1901 – New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates.
- 1938 – U.S. Supreme Court delivers its opinion in Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins and overturns a century of federal common law.
- 1939 – DC Comics publishes its second major superhero in Detective Comics #27; he is Batman, one of the most popular comic book superheroes of all time.
- 1953 – Francis Crick and James D. Watson publish Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid describing the double helix structure of DNA.
- 1959 – The St. Lawrence Seaway, linking the North American Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean, officially opens to shipping.
- 1961 – Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.
- 2003 – The Human Genome Project comes to an end two and a half years earlier than expected.
Photo by woody1778a.
