History for December 20

History for December 20 - On-This-Day.com
Samuel Mudd 1833 - Physician that set John Wilkes Booth's leg after the assissination of President Lincoln, Harvey Firestone 1868 - Founder Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Max Lerner 1902 


George Roy Hill 1922 - Director, John Hillerman 1932 - Actor ("Magnum, p.i."), Jenny Agutter 1952 - Actress ("The Snow Goose," "Logan's Run") 


1606 - The "Susan Constant," "Godspeed" and "Discovery" set sail from London. Their landing at Jamestown, VA, was the start of the first permanent English settlement in America. 


1820 - The state of Missouri enacted legislation to tax bachelors between the ages of 21-50 for being unmarried. The tax was $1 a year. 


1892 - Alexander T. Brown and George Stillman patented the pneumatic tire. 


1946 - The Frank Capra film "It's A Wonderful Life" had a preview showing for charity at New York City's Globe Theatre, a day before its "official" world premiere. James Stewart and Donna Reed star in the film. 


1946 - In Indochina (Vietnam), full-scale guerrilla warfare between Vietnam partisans and French troops began. 


1989 - General Noriega, Panama's former dictator, was overthrown by a United States invasion force invited by the new civilian government. The project was known as Operation Just Cause. 


1990 - The world's first website and server go live at CERN. The first website was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. 


1995 - An American Airlines Boeing 757 en route to Cali, Colombia, crashed into a mountain, killing all but four of the 163 people aboard.