1768 – The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is published.

1979 – The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two diseases that have been driven to extinction (with rinderpest in 2011 being the other).

1968 – Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as "The Mother of All Demos", publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS).

2019 – First confirmed case of COVID-19 in China.

1980 – John Lennon is murdered by Mark David Chapman in front of The Dakota in New York City.

World War II became real to many Americans on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, when 350 Japanese planes staged two air attacks on the U. S. military in Pearl Harbor and surrounding bases on Oahu, Hawaii. The attacks that morning took the U.S. Armed Forces by complete surprise.

1932 – German-born Swiss physicist Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.

2006 – NASA reveals photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggesting the presence of liquid water on Mars.

1971 – During a concert by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention at the Montreux Casino, an audience member fires a flare gun into the ceiling, causing a fire that destroys the venue. The incident served as the inspiration for Deep Purple's 1973 song Smoke on the Water.

1997 – In Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, representatives from 121 countries sign the Ottawa Treaty prohibiting manufacture and deployment of anti-personnel landmines. The United States, People's Republic of China, and Russia do not sign the treaty, however.

1992 – A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world's first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

1984 – Bhopal disaster: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom later died from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

1979 – Iranian Revolution: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini becomes the first Supreme Leader of Iran.

1967 – At Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa, a transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).

1970 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency begins operations.

1942 – World War II: During the Manhattan Project, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

2020 – The Arecibo Telescope collapsed.

2019 – The outbreak of coronavirus infection began in Wuhan.

1955 – American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to that city's bus boycott.