1884 – Allan Pinkerton dies at the age of 64. Pinkerton, was a Scottish-American detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. At the time of his death, he was working on a system for criminal identification records, which is now maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
1908 – SOS is adopted as a signal of international concern. In the official notation SOS is written with one line, to indicate that the Morse code equivalents for the individual letters are transmitted as a continuous sequence of three dots, three lines, three dots without spaces, between the letters. SOS means “Save our souls”.
1957 – The International Year of Geophysics officially begins. The International Year of Geophysics was an international scientific project that lasted from July 1, 1957 to December 31, 1958. It marked the end of a long period, throughout the Cold War, when the scientific exchange between East and West had been severely disrupted.
1961 – Carl Lewis is born in Alabama. Lewis, is a former American athlete, who won nine Olympic gold medals, one Olympic silver medal and 10 World Championship medals, including eight gold medals. His career lasted from 1979 to 1996, when he last won a medal at an event at the Olympics.
1968 – The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is signed in Washington, London, and Moscow by 62 countries. This is an international treaty whose purpose is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
1991 – During the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Pact is formally dissolved during a meeting in Prague. The Warsaw Pact was a collective defense treaty signed in Warsaw, Poland between the Soviet Union and the seven other socialist republics of the Eastern Bloc of Central and Eastern Europe in May 1955, during the Cold War.
2002 – The International Criminal Court is established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. The ICC has no universal territorial jurisdiction, and can only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, and crimes committed by nationals of member states.
