On This Day: February 21

This is the 52nd day of the year.

Fact of the Day: Doberman

Doberman dogs get their name from a German tax collector. Aware of the unpopularity of his job, Ludwig Dobermann, of Apolda in Thuringia, developed in the 1880s an especially fierce breed to help him on his rounds. Today, Dobermans are widely used as guard dogs.

Holidays

Feast day of St. Robert Southwell, St. Peter Damian, St. George of Amastris, and St. Germanus of Granfel.

Argentina: Tincunaco Ceremony.

Bangladesh: Martyrs Day.

Events

1795 - Freedom of worship was established in France.

1804 - British engineer Richard Trevithick demonstrated the first steam engine to run on rails.

1838 - Samuel F.P. Morse gave the first public demonstration of his telegraph.

1842 - John J. Greenough of Washington, D.C. patented the sewing machine.

1848 - The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx with the assistance of Friedrich Engels, was published in London by the Communist League.

1866 - Lucy B. Hobbs became the first woman to graduate from a dental school, the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in Cincinnati.

1878 - The first telephone directory was issued, by the District Telephone Company of New Haven, Connecticut.

1885 - The 555-foot-high Washington Monument was dedicated.

1916 - In World War I, the Battle of Verdun in northeast France began when German artillery barraged the French lines.

1925 - The first issue of "The New Yorker" went on sale.

1947 - Edwin H. Land publicly demonstrated his Polaroid Land camera, which could produce a black-and-white photograph in 60 seconds.

1972 - Richard M. Nixon arrived in China for an eight-day official visit. He was the first U.S. president to visit the People's Republic of China since its inception in 1949.

1975 - Former U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H.R. Haldeman, and John D. Ehrlichman were sentenced to 2.5-8 years in prison for their roles in the Watergate cover-up.

1995 - Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett became the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Saskatchewan, Canada.

2000 - David Letterman returns to The Late Show after having an emergency quintuple heart bypass surgery.

Births

1823 - Pierre Laffitte, French philosopher.

1855 - Alice Elvira Freeman Palmer, American educator, administrator.

1893 - Andrés Segovia, Spanish musician and guitarist.

1903 - Anaïis Nin, French-born American author.

1907 - W.H. Auden, English poet.

1927 - Erma Louise Bombeck, American humorist, columnist, writer.

1977 - Kevin Rose, known for founding the social-bookmarking Web site Digg and as former co-host of the TechTV show The Screen Savers.

Deaths

1941 - Frederick Banting, Canadian physician, recipient of the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

1965 - El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcom X), black militant leader, assassinated.

1968 - Howard Walter Florey, Australian-born pharmocologist, who shared a 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

1999 - Gertrude B. Elion, American biochemist and pharmacologist, and a 1988 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.