#TodayInHistory – May 16

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May 16 – Some important events on this day

1204 👉🏼 Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders, is crowned as the first Emperor of the Latin Empire of Constantinople
1571 👉🏼 German astronomer Johannes Kepler, by his own calculations, is conceived at 4:37 AM
1792 👉🏼 Denmark abolishes slave trade 🇩🇰
1868 👉🏼 US Senate fails to impeach President Andrew Johnson by one vote
1920 👉🏼 Joan of Arc (Jeanne D’arc) canonized a saint
1943 👉🏼 Operation Chastise: No. 617 Squadron RAF begins the famous Dambusters Raid, bombing the Möhne and Eder dams in the Ruhr valley with bouncing bombs 💣
1944 👉🏼 1st of 180,000+ Hungarian Jews reach Auschwitz
1960 👉🏼 Theodore Maiman operates the first optical laser, at Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California

1975 👉🏼 A nurse stabs an expectant mother to death and steals the unborn baby.
44-years-old Norma Jean Armistead checks herself into Kaiser Hospital in Los Angeles, California, with a newborn that she claims to have given birth to at home. However, examining doctors were confused when it appeared that Norma hadn’t actually given birth. The mystery was soon solved when a 28-year-old woman turned up dead in her apartment. The baby she was carrying, and expected to give birth to shortly, had been cut from her body. Doctors quickly pieced the evidence together and Norma was arrested for murder and sent to prison for life.

1990 👉🏼 Eugene Stoner and Mikhail Kalashnikov, the creators of the M16 rifle and the AK-47 rifle respectively, meet in Washington, D.C.
The AK-47 assault rifle is perhaps the most famous weapon in the world: manufactured by the millions since its creation by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1949, it has seen action in almost every conflict since. And it has often come into conflict with armies wielding the M16 assault rifle, also one of the most famous and produced weapons in the world.
The rifles were created by arch-enemies – the AK-47 by the Soviets and the M16 by the Americans. It would only be in 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, that their respective creators would meet in Washington D.C. Perhaps not so surprisingly the two men became friends, a shared bond with their unique stories, touring the city and visiting a hunting lodge.