#TodayInHistory – September 12

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September 12 – Some important events on this day.

490 BC 👉🏼 Traditional date of the Battle of Marathon, where a small Athenian force defeats the Persian Empire
1624 👉🏼 1st submarine publicly tested in London on the Thames for King James I
1755 👉🏼 Giacomo Casanova is sentenced to 5 years imprisonment in Venice without trial for affront to religion and common decency
1758 👉🏼 French astronomer Charles Messier mistakenly identifies the Crab Nebula so begins his Messier Catalogue
1909 👉🏼 World’s first patent for synthetic rubber granted to German chemist Fritz Hofmann
1910 👉🏼 United States’ 1st known female cop appointed, Alice Stebbins Wells by LAPD
1919 👉🏼 Adolf Hitler joins the obscure German Worker’s Party as its seventh member, agreeing not with worker’s rights, but with its German Nationalism and antisemitism
1933 👉🏼 Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives idea of a nuclear chain reaction

1940 👉🏼 A French boy, following his dog down a hole near Lascaux, France discover 17,000 year old drawings now known as the Lascaux Cave Paintings.
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1958 👉🏼 US Supreme Court orders the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas to integrate
1959 👉🏼 Luna 2 launched by USSR; 1st spacecraft to impact on the Moon

1981 👉🏼 “The Smurfs” animated cartoon series by Hanna-Barbera first broadcasts in North America.
The Smurfs are the invention of a Belgian cartoonist Peyo (Pierre Culliford). The first appeared in 1958 with another cartoon story “Johan et Pirlouit” and were originally called “Schtroumpf”, translated into German as Smurf.
The Smurfs first appeared in their own cartoons in 1959 and in their own movie “The Smurfs and the Magic Flute” in 1976. Hanna-Barbera Productions then produced a widely popular cartoon series in 1981 which ran until 1990. Sony pictures went on to release the first live-action/computer-animated Smurf film in 2011.