On January 3, 1641, English astronomer Jeremiah Horrocks passed away. He was the first scientist to demonstrate that the Moon moved around the Earth in an elliptical orbit and was the only person to predict the transit of Venus of 1639.
On 2 January 1860, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier announced the discovery of Vulcan, a hypothetical planet inside the Mercury orbit, to a meeting of the Académie des Sciences in Paris.
On December 10, 1851, Melvil Dewey, librarian and inventor of the Dewey Decimal classification system for libraries, the DDC (Dewey Decimal Classification), was born.
On October 21, 2003, a photograph of the nocturnal sky was taken and revealed a possible 10th planet in our solar system: Eris. Unfortunately scientists came then to the conclusion that Eris and also Pluto could no longer hold the status as planets and were called dwarf planets from this point.
On September 17, 1991, the Finnish student of computer science Linus Torwalds uploaded Linux kernel version 0.01 of his later to become famous operating system Linux to the ftp server ftp.funet.fi and made it publicly available.