6th of August

Today is the 218th day of the year with approximately 147 days remaining.

1787 - Sixty proof sheets of the Constitution of the United States are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.

1809 - Famed English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson is born on this day.

1819 - Norwich University is founded in Vermont as the first private military school in the United States.

1825 -  Independence Day is declared for the country of Bolivia from Spain.

1862 - The Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering damage in a battle with USS Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

1890 - At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair.

1911 - American actress, best known for her red hair and sitcom I Love Lucy, Lucille Ball is born.

1915 - The allies mount at diversionary attack timed to coincide with a major Allied landing of reinforcements at Suvla Bay, known as the Battle of Sari Bair.

1926 - Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel.

1926 - Harry Houdini performs the greatest feat by spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping.

1928 - American artist known for his "pop art," Andy Warhol is born.

1945 - Hiroshima is devastated when the atomic bomb "Little Boy" is dropped by the U.S. B-29 Enola Gay.  Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning.

1945 - Richard Bong, the United States' highest-scoring ace, having shot down at least 40 Japanese aircraft during World War 11, and a recipient of the Medal of Honor died on this day.  He was test flying the P-80 Shooting Star jet fighter, when the primary fuel pump malfunctioned during takeoff.  He ejected from the aircraft but was too low for his parachute to deploy.

1964 - Prometheus, A bristlecone pine tree and the world's oldest tree is cut down.

1965 - President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.  This was legislation at outlawed discriminatory voting properties that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisment of African-Americans.

1970 - Indian-born, American film director known for his movies with supernatural plots and twist ending, M. Night Shyamalan is born. 

1990 - The United Nations Security Council orders a global trade embargo against Iraq in response to the country's invasion of Kuwait.

1991 - Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web.  WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.

1996 - NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms.

1997 - Korean Air Flight 801, a Boeing 747-300, crashes into the jungle on Guam on approach to the airport and kills 228 people.