Calendar for July 28th, 2012

1493: Great fire in Moscow

1540: Henry VIII married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard

1540: Thomas Cromwell was executed on order from King Henry VIII on charges of treason

Died 1750: Johann Sebastian Bach (composer)

1794: Maximilien Robespierre was guillotined, ending the Reign of Terror (French Revolution)

Died 1817: Jane Austen (author)

Born 1866: Beatrix Potter (author)

1866: The metric system became legal in the United States

Born 1887: Marcel Duchamp (painter)

Born 1907: Earl S. Tupper (inventor of Tupperware)

Born 1909: Malcolm Lowry (author)

1915: U.S. occupation of Haiti began

1929: NFL added a fourth official, the field judge

Born 1929: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (U.S. First Lady)

Died 1934: Marie Dressler (actress)

Born 1943: Bill Bradley (basketball player & politician)

Born 1945: Jim Davis (cartoonist)

1945: A U.S. bomber flying through thick fog at about 200 mph crashed into the 79th floor of New York's Empire State Building, killing 14 people

Born 1958: Terrance Stanley Fox (cross-country runner, Canadian hero)

1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson requested that 50,000 additional soldiers be sent to Vietnam

1973: Lee Majors and Farrah Fawcett were married

1977: First oil through the Alaskan Pipeline reached Valdez Marine Terminal in Alaska

1996: The remains of a prehistoric man were discovered near Kennewick, Washington

Died 1996: Roger Tory Peterson (artist & ornithologist)

2002: Nine coal miners rescued after being trapped 77 hours in flooded Quecreek Mine, Somerset, Pennsylvania

Died 2004: Francis Crick (Nobel Prize-winning scientist who co-discovered the spiral, "double-helix" structure of DNA)