• 1822: Birth of Gregor Johann Mendel, Austrian pioneer of the study of heredity. As a geneticist, botanist and plant experimenter, he was the first to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics, in what came to be called Mendelism.
• 1844: Birth of the Reverend William Archibald Spooner, Anglican clergyman and warden of New College, Oxford. Spooner sometimes muddled the first letters or syllables of a word, as, for example, when he described the Lord as a 'shoving leopard', or introduced a hymn as 'Kinquering kongs their titles take'. This kind of transposition became known as a 'Spoonerism'.
• 1888: Birth of Selman Abraham Waksman, Ukranian born American biochemist whose discovery of streptomycin, the first specific agent effective in the treatment of tuberculosis brought him the 1952 Nobel Prize for Medicine. He is credited with coining the term 'antibiotic'.
• 1900: Norman Pritchard from India won a silver medal in the 200-metre race at the Paris Olympics. He also won the now discontinued 200-metre hurdles.
• 1933: Wiley Post became the first person to fly solo around the world. He did it in 7 days 18 hours and 49 minutes in a Lockheed Vega monoplane Winnie Mae.
{{/usCountry}}• 1933: Wiley Post became the first person to fly solo around the world. He did it in 7 days 18 hours and 49 minutes in a Lockheed Vega monoplane Winnie Mae.
{{/usCountry}}• 1934: John Dillinger (1903-34), the first American criminal to be named Public Enemy Number One, was shot and killed in Chicago. He was betrayed by his female companion Anna Sage, known, as 'the lady in red',