An inscription on the frame records that the enormous altarpiece, begun by Hubert van Eyck and completed by his brother Jan, was installed and dedicated in the Church of Saint John (later Saint Bavo Cathedral) in Ghent. Its dazzling realism, jewel-like detail, and mastery of oil glazing techniques influenced European painting for generations and made it one of the most stolen and coveted artworks in history.

Six vessels under Lieutenant Charles Wilkes set sail from Virginia on a US government-funded scientific expedition into the Pacific and Antarctic waters. Over four years, the 'Wilkes Expedition' charted a vast stretch of Antarctic coastline, confirming it as a continent, and returned with scientific collections that became the founding core of the Smithsonian Institution.

Following Clyde Tombaugh's discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object weeks earlier, the Lowell Observatory formally announced its name: Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld. The suggestion came from Venetia Burney, an eleven-year-old English schoolgirl who thought a dark, distant world deserved a name from the underworld, and it beat out rival names Minerva and Cronus.

Working at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, Albert Einstein and physicist Nathan Rosen submitted a paper describing solutions to general relativity that modeled particles as bridges in spacetime, later dubbed 'Einstein-Rosen bridges.' The concept, essentially a mathematical wormhole, became a staple of theoretical physics and science fiction alike.

Anger over a brutal Monopoly Bureau raid the previous night boiled into citywide protest in Taipei. Nationalist government forces fired on demonstrators outside the governor's office, triggering the '228 Incident.' Chiang Kai-shek's regime responded with troops from the mainland who killed an estimated 18,000 to 28,000 Taiwanese in the following weeks, launching decades of martial law and the White Terror.

In a Cambridge laboratory, James Watson pieced together cardboard cutouts of nucleotide bases and noticed adenine paired neatly with thymine, guanine with cytosine. The insight explained how DNA could replicate itself and unlocked the double helix structure, which he and Francis Crick would publish weeks later. It became one of the twentieth century's defining scientific breakthroughs.

Riding the explosive success of their February 9 Ed Sullivan Show appearance, watched by roughly 73 million Americans, the Beatles saw their records dominate the US charts through late February 1964. Their commercial surge marked the definitive start of the British Invasion, reshaping American popular music and youth culture for the rest of the decade.

At midnight Washington time (8 a.m. in Kuwait), a ceasefire ordered by President George H.W. Bush took effect, ending the Gulf War exactly 100 hours after the ground campaign began. A U.S.-led coalition of 35 nations had routed Iraqi forces and liberated Kuwait following Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion, leaving Kuwaiti oil fields ablaze and a 'highway of death' littered with destroyed retreating vehicles.

Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms attempted to serve a search warrant on the Mount Carmel compound of David Koresh's Branch Davidian sect. A firefight erupted, killing four ATF agents and six Davidians, and the botched raid escalated into a 51-day FBI siege that ended on April 19 with a fire that killed 76 people inside.