April 4 is National vitamin C Day. Learn something new about this super vitamin and while you are at it, brush up on your history with this list of major events of April 4.
- 1581-Francis Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I.
- 1789-1st US Congress begins regular sessions during George Washington’s presidency at Federal Hall, NYC.
- 1812-The territory of Orleans became the 18th U.S. state.
- 1850-Los Angeles was incorporated.
- 1902-Cecil Rhodes left $10 million in his will that provide scholarships for Americans at Oxford University in England.
- 1917-The U.S. Senate voted 90-6 to enter World War I on the Allies’ side.
- 1932-Professor C.G. King, of the University of Pittsburgh, did extensive research on isolated vitamin C.
- 1949-NATO was formed on this day.
- 1967-The U.S. lost its 500th plane over Vietnam.
- 1969-Denton Cooley implants the first artificial heart.
- 1968-US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by James Earl Ray at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee.
- 1973-World Trade Center twin towers were opened.
- 1975-Microsoft was founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.
- 1979-The former President of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was deposed by a coup d’etat and hanged despite international calls to stop the execution.
- 1981-Henry Cisneros became the first Mexican-American elected mayor of a major U.S. city (San Antonio, TX.).
- 1985-A coup in Sudan ousted President Nimeiry and replaced him with General Dahab.
- 1987-The U.S. charged the Soviet Union with wiretapping a U.S. Embassy.
- 1994-Netscape Communications was founded.
- 2013-Poecilotheria rajaei, a giant tarantula with a 20cm leg span, was discovered in Sri Lanka.
- 2017-In Honk Kong, the Pink Star diamond sold at $71 million. The auction set a record for any diamond or jewel.