In 1876, inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone. (The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bell the rightful inventor.)
AP
1912: Arizona
In 1912, Arizona became the 48th state of the Union as President William Howard Taft signed a proclamation.
AP
1924: IBM
In 1924, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. of New York was formally renamed International Business Machines Corp., or IBM.
Richard Drew
1967: Aretha Franklin
In 1967, Aretha Franklin recorded her cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” at Atlantic Records in New York.
Anonymous
1984: Stormie Jones
In 1984, 6-year-old Stormie Jones became the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient when the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (she lived until November 1990).
Gene Puskar
1989: Salman Rushdie
In 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel condemned as blasphemous.
AP
2013: Oscar Pistorius
In 2013, double-amputee Olympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in Pretoria, South Africa; he was later convicted of murder and served nearly nine years of a sentence of 13 years and five months before being released from prison in January 2024.
AP
2017: Pedro Hernandez
A former store clerk, Pedro Hernandez, was convicted in New York of murder in one of the nation’s most haunting missing-child cases, nearly 38 years after 6-year-old Etan Patz (AY’-tahn payts) disappeared while on the way to a school bus stop.
Elizabeth Williams
2018: Nikolas Cruz
In 2018, a gunman identified as a former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the attack in Newtown, Conn., more than five years earlier. (Nikolas Cruz pleaded guilty to murder in October 2021 and was sentenced in November 2022 to life in prison without the possibility of parole.)
