1121: Battle of Didgori: The Georgian army under King David the Builder wins a decisive victory over the famous Seljuk commander Ilghazi.
1480: Battle of Otranto – Ottoman troops behead 800 Christians for refusing to convert to Islam
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1848: The death of George Stephenson English civil engineer and mechanical engineer who built the first public inter-city railway line in the world to use steam locomotives, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway which opened in 1830. This statue of George Stephenson is at the York Railway Museum
1851: American inventor Isaac Singer patents the sewing machine
1865: Joseph Lister became the first doctor to use disinfectant during surgery.
1877: First model for phonograph
Thomas Edison completed the 1st model for the phonograph, which is a device that recorded sound onto tinfoil cylinders on August 12, 1877. Edison was trying to improve the telegraph transmitter when he noticed that the movement of the paper tape through the machine produced a noise resembling spoken words when played at a high speed.
1944: During World War II, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., eldest son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was killed with his co-pilot when their explosives-laden Navy plane blew up over England.
1952: The Night of the Murdered Poets: 13 prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow.
1953: Nuclear weapons testing: The Soviet atomic bomb project continues with the detonation of Joe 4, the first Soviet thermonuclear weapon.
1964: The British author and journalist Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, the world’s most famous fictional spy, dies of a heart attack at age 56 in Kent, England. Fleming’s series of novels about the debonair Agent 007, based in part on their dashing author’s real-life experiences, spawned one of the most lucrative film franchises in history.
1964: A massive manhunt got under way across Britain after Charlie Wilson, one of the gang involved in the Great Train Robbery, broke out of the high-security Winson Green prison in Birmingham. He was on the run for four years, before being finally re-captured in Canada and returned to jail in Britain, where he served out the rest of his sentence. Wilson then moved to the Costa del Sol in Spain, was alleged to have become involved in drugs dealing and was shot dead by a hitman on 23rd April 1990 as he relaxed by his swimming pool.
1989: Samuel Sochukwuma Okwaraji, a Nigerian professional footballer, died while playing a World Cup qualification match against Angola at the Lagos National Stadium in Surulere, Lagos State.
1990: The largest dinosaur fossil is found.
Fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovers three huge bones jutting out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. They turn out to be part of the largest-ever Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered, a 65-million-year-old specimen dubbed Sue, after its discoverer. Amazingly, Sue’s skeleton was over 90 percent complete, and the bones were extremely well-preserved.
2017: A driver sped into a crowd of people peacefully protesting a white nationalist rally in the Virginia college town of Charlottesville, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others. (The attacker, James Alex Fields, was sentenced to life in prison on 29 federal hate crime charges, and life plus 419 years on state charges.)
BIRTHS ON THIS DAY: August 12
Pete Sampras, 53 years
An American tennis player, who won 14 Grand Slam titles was born in Washington, D.C. on August 12, 1971. His professional career began in 1988 and ended at the 2002 US Open, which he won, defeating his longtime rival Andre Agassi in the final.
