Major Events
- 1121 Battle of Didgori: Georgian army under King David the Builder wins a decisive victory over the renowned Seljuk commander Ilghazi
- 1480 Ottoman troops conquer Otranto in southern Italy after a 15-day siege, killing 12,000, enslaving 5,000, and beheading 800 Christians for refusing to convert to Islam
- 1851 American inventor Isaac Singer patents his famous sewing machine
- 1908 Ford Motor Company builds its first Model T car, which Henry Ford himself tests on a hunting trip to Wisconsin and Northern Michigan [1]
- 1981 Don Estridge unveils the company’s first personal computer, the IBM PC, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, priced at USD 1,565 with 16 kilobytes of RAM, helping bring computing to the masses [1]
Aug 12 in Film & TV
- 1927 Silent film “Wings,” starring Clara Bow and directed by William A. Wellman, premieres in NY as the first film and one of only two silent films to win an Academy Award for Best Picture
Aug 12 in Music
- 1991 Heavy metal band Metallica releases its fifth album, “Metallica,” which debuts at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart
Aug 12 in Sport
- 1964 Mickey Mantle switch-hits a home run for the record 10th and final time in a game, with one going 502 feet
Did You Know?
The last quagga (a zebra subspecies with fewer stripes) dies at the Artis Magistra Zoo in Amsterdam
Fun Fact About August 12
Nicaragua celebrates the end of its National Literacy Crusade, a massive effort over five months that reduces illiteracy from 50% to 12%
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