After months hunting the coastline of South America for a route westward, Magellan's expedition neared the entrance to what became known as the Strait of Magellan around this time in 1520. The discovery would let his surviving ships become the first to sail from the Atlantic into the Pacific, a passage that reshaped global navigation for four centuries until the Panama Canal opened.
On the mango-grove plains of Plassey in Bengal, Robert Clive's outnumbered force routed the Nawab's army largely because Clive had secretly bribed the Nawab's commander, Mir Jafar, to hold back his troops. The victory gave the East India Company control of Bengal's treasury and trade, a turning point that transformed a trading company into a colonial power ruling millions.
Signed in London by the major European powers, the treaty resolved years of dispute following Belgium's split from the Netherlands by dividing the old Grand Duchy of Luxembourg: the French-speaking western portion joined Belgium as its province of Luxembourg, while the remainder became a fully sovereign Grand Duchy tied personally to the Dutch crown. The settlement fixed Luxembourg's modern borders and cemented its unusual status as an independent state.
Wisconsin printer and inventor Christopher Latham Sholes secured patent protection for his 'Type-Writer,' developed with collaborators Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule. Manufactured commercially a few years later by E. Remington and Sons, the machine standardized the QWERTY keyboard layout still used today and transformed clerical work, giving rise to new professions and, notably, opening office jobs to women.
Alan Mathison Turing entered the world in Maida Vale, London, to a father in the Indian civil service. He would grow up to publish the 1936 paper defining the theoretical basis of computation, break the German Enigma cipher at Bletchley Park during World War II, and pioneer questions of machine intelligence, before his 1954 death made him one of science's most mourned tragic figures.
Tucked into a broader education bill, Title IX's central sentence banned discrimination 'on the basis of sex' in any federally funded education program. Few anticipated its seismic effect on athletics: before 1972, fewer than 300,000 American girls played high school sports; within decades that number exceeded 3 million, as schools were forced to fund women's teams on par with men's.
Flight 182, en route from Montreal to London and on to Delhi, exploded at 31,000 feet off the Irish coast after a bomb hidden in checked luggage detonated. All 329 passengers and crew died, most of them Canadian citizens of Indian origin. Investigators linked the bombing to Sikh separatist militants seeking retaliation for the Indian government's 1984 raid on the Golden Temple.