Today in History

From wikipedia.org:

Events
1700 - February 28 is followed by March 1 in Sweden, thus creating the Swedish calendar
1827 - The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is incorporated, becoming the first railroad offering commercial transportation of both people and freight
1844 - A gun on USS Princeton explodes while the boat is on a Potomac River cruise, killing two United States Cabinet members and several others
1849 - Regular steamboat service from the west to the east coast of the United States begins with the arrival of the SS California in San Francisco Bay, 4 months 21 days after leaving New York Harbor
1850 - The University of Utah opens in Salt Lake City, Utah
1854 - The United States Republican Party is organized in Ripon, Wisconsin
1861 - Colorado is organized as a United States territory
1883 - The first vaudeville theater is opened, in Boston, Massachusetts
1885 - The American Telephone and Telegraph Company was incorporated in New York State as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone. (American Bell would later merge with its subsidiary.)
1935 - Nylon is discovered by Wallace Carothers
1940 - Basketball is televised for the first time (Fordham University vs. the University of Pittsburgh in Madison Square Garden)
1952 - End of 8th Winter Olympic Games in Oslo
1953 - James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; formal announcement April 25 following publication in April Nature (pub. April 2)
1960 - End of 10th Winter Olympic Games in Squaw Valley, California
1974 - After seven years, the United States and Egypt re-establish diplomatic relations
1983 - The final episode of M*A*S*H is broadcast in the USA, becoming the most watched television episode in history, with 106–125 million viewers in the U.S. (estimate varies by source)
1993 - Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raid the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest cult leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff
2001 - An earthquake measuring 6.9 on the Richter Scale hits the Nisqually Valley area of Washington. There were no reports of any deaths

Births
1827 - Blondin, French tightrope walker whose spectacular crossings of Niagara Falls (USA/Canada) made him world famous (d. 1897)
1862 - Canon Edwin Sidney Savage, Rector of Hexham Abbey and St Bartholomew the Great (d. 1947)
1878 - Pierre Fatou, French Mathematician, who worked on iteration theory which was later analysed by Benoit Mandelbrot
1901 - Linus Pauling, the only winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1954 and Peace 1962 (d. 1994)
1929 - Hayden Fry, college football coach
1942 - Brian Jones, musician ("The Rolling Stones") (d. 1969)
1945 - Bubba Smith, American football player, actor (Police Academy)
1948 - Bernadette Peters, actress, singer
2001 - Smarty Jones, winner of the 2004 Kentucky Derby

Deaths
1916 - Henry James, writer (b. 1843)
1979 - “The famous Mr. Ed”, the talking horse
1998 - Dermot Morgan, actor, comedian (b. 1952)
2003 - Roger Michael Needham, professor of cryptography at Cambridge University