April 16-"The only bird that can talk is the parrot, and he doesn't fly very well."
Wilbur Wright
Wilbur Wright
Wilbur Wright, born this day in 1867, was an American inventor and aviation pioneer who, with his brother Orville, achieved the first powered, sustained, and controlled airplane flight (1903) and built and flew the first fully practical airplane (1905).
Lenin's exile ended
1917: Vladimir Ilich Lenin, exiled since 1900, returned to Russia on this day to form a Provisional Government. Thinking that Russia's involvement in World War I might continue indefinitely and that the prospects for revolution were dimming, Lenin and his associates hastened to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) after they learned that its citizens had deposed Tsar Nicholas II the previous month, when he and his family were taken from the Winter Palace.
1948: Sixteen European countries formed the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation to coordinate efforts to restore Europe's economy; in 1961 it was re-formed as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and expanded to include 18 countries.
1919: American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham was born in Centralia, Washington.
1859: French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville died in Cannes, France.
1838: French forces occupied the Mexican city of Veracruz during the Pastry War.
1755: French painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, known for her portraits of Queen Marie-Antoinette, was born in Paris.
1746: An English army defeated a Scottish force under Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) at the Battle of Culloden, ending the Jacobite effort to restore the Stuarts to England's throne.
1646: French architect Jules Hardouin-Mansart, who redesigned and expanded the Palace of Versailles, was born in Paris.
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