1962: Canadian-born American pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey awarded the U.S. President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for her refusal to authorize thalidomide.
1960: Ivory Coast becomes independent from France.
1959: The Lincoln Memorial design on the U.S. penny goes into circulation. It replaces the "sheaves of wheat" design, and was minted until 2008.
1955: Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, sells its first transistor radios in Japan.
1947: The Bombay Municipal Corporation formally takes over the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport (BEST).
1947: Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.
1944: IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).
1942: World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal begins as the United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
1909: Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York, New York to San Francisco, California.