Today in History, 11/18

1307: According to legend, William Tell shoots an apple off of his son's head.
1421: A seawall at the Zuiderzee dike breaks, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people in the Netherlands.
1493: Christopher Columbus first sights what is now Puerto Rico.
1626: St. Peter's Basilica in Rome is consecrated.

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1686: Charles Francois Felix operates on King Louis XIV of France's anal fistula after practicing the surgery on several peasants. Have I mentioned recently how glad I am to live in the modern age?
1865: Mark Twain's story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is published in the New York Saturday Press.
1883: American and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times.
1903: The Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty is signed by the United States and Panama, giving the Americans exclusive rights over the Panama Canal Zone.
1923: Alan B. Shepard, Jr, the first American in space, is born.1926: George Bernard Shaw refuses to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."
1928: Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks is released. This is considered to be Mickey's official birthday.

1929: Off the south coast of Newfoundland in the Atlantic Ocean, a Richter magnitude 7.2 submarine earthquake, centered on Grand Banks, breaks 12 submarine transatlantic telegraph cables and triggers a tsunami that destroys many south coast communities in the Burin Peninsula, Newfoundland area.
1955: Carter Burwell is born. He has done the soundtrack for most of the Coen brothers' movies.1966: U.S. Roman Catholic bishops do away with the rule against eating meat on Fridays.
1968: Owen Wilson is born. He played Hansel in Zoolander.

1975: Big Papi is born.1978: In Guyana, Jim Jones leads his Peoples Temple cult in a mass murder-suicide that claims 918 lives in all, 909 of them at Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo J. Ryan is assassinated by members of Peoples Temple shortly beforehand.1985: The comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, created by Bill Waterson, first appears in 30 newspapers across the U.S.
1985: Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann's playing career comes to an end when a sack by the Giants' Lawrence Taylor snaps Theismann's legs. The video's pretty icky, so you can watch it here.


Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.