Ingenpedia:OnThisDay/January 4, 2021

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 * 1698 – Most of London's Palace of Whitehall, from 1530 the main residence of the English monarchs, was destroyed by fire.
 * 1847 – American gun inventor Samuel Colt sold the first thousand of his Colt Walker revolvers to the Texas Rangers.
 * 1885 – Sino-French War: French troops under General Oscar de Négrier defeated a larger Qing Chinese force at the Battle of Núi Bop in northern Vietnam.
 * 1936 – Billboard magazine published its first music hit parade.
 * 1948 – Burma achieved independence from the British Empire, with Sao Shwe Thaik as its first president.
 * 1972 – Rose Heilbron became the first female judge to sit at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.
 * 1973 – Last of the Summer Wine, the longest-running sitcom in the world, premiered as an episode of the BBC's Comedy Playhouse.
 * 1989 – Two American F-14 Tomcats shot down two Libyan MiG-23 Floggers that appeared to be attempting to engage them over the Gulf of Sirte in the Mediterranean Sea.
 * 2004 – Spirit, the first of two rovers of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission, successfully landed on Mars.
 * 2007 – Nancy Pelosi became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, becoming the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government.
 * Born/died this day: | Moses Mendelssohn |d|1786| Louis Braille |b|1809| George Tryon |b|1832| Clara Emilia Smitt |b|1864| Josef Suk |b|1874| Johanna Westerdijk |b|1883| T. S. Eliot |d|1965| Brian Horrocks |d|1985

January 4: Colonial Martyrs Repression Day in Angola (1961)


 * 1798 – After his investiture as Prince of Wallachia, Constantine Hangerli (pictured) arrived in Bucharest to assume the throne.
 * 1853 – Solomon Northup regained his freedom after having been sold into slavery in the American South; his memoir Twelve Years a Slave later became a national bestseller.
 * 1912 – The Boy Scouts Association was incorporated throughout the British Empire by royal charter.
 * 1951 – Korean War: Chinese and North Korean troops captured Seoul from United Nations forces.
 * 2018 – A passenger train collided with a truck and derailed in the Free State, South Africa, killing 21 people and injuring 254 others.