On This Day in History

Service ended on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue Line, one of the first major electrified train lines in the U.S. (steam train pictured).

Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to form Tanzania with Julius Nyerere as its first president.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) came into being when the WIPO Convention entered into force.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (pictured) near Chernobyl, Ukrainian SSR, suffered a steam explosion, resulting in a fire, a nuclear meltdown, and the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people around Europe.

An editorial was published in the People's Daily denouncing the growing unrest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing which would remain contentious through the remainder of the protests.

A tornado struck the Manikganj District of Bangladesh and killed an estimated 1,300 people, making it the deadliest tornado in history.

Just before landing at Nagoya Airport, Japan, the copilot of China Airlines Flight 140 inadvertently triggered the takeoff/go-around switch, causing the aircraft to crash and killing 264 of the 271 people on board.

The CIH virus activated widely, damaging hundreds of thousands of computers and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

An expelled student murdered sixteen people and wounded seven others before committing suicide at the Gutenberg-Gymnasium Erfurt in Erfurt, Germany.

Controversy surrounding the relocation of the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn, a Soviet Red Army World War II memorial in Tallinn, Estonia, erupted into mass protests and riots.

The Shandong was launched for the People's Liberation Army Navy, China's first domestically built aircraft carrier.