16th century

1506 - Columbus dies in Spain.

1512 Michelangelo finishes the Sistine Chapel.

17th century
1609 - Johann Kepler has discovered that Mars is moving about the sun not in a
perfect circle but in an ellipse contradicting Plato's belief about perfection and the
heavens.
 1632 - Galileo publishes his ideas about the
universe. Intellectuals across Europe applaud. The Church prohibits further sales of the
book, and Galileo is ordered to appear before the Inquisition in Rome.

18th century
1706 - In Boston, Benjamin Franklin is born, the tenth son of a candle and soap maker.
1772 - Oxygen is discovered by the
Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele. Europeans have been investigating the
properties of gasses.

19th century
1821 - Napoleon Bonaparte dies at the age of fifty-one under British authority on the
island of St. Helena, the reported cause: stomach cancer.
1839 - Charles Goodyear invents vulcanization, for making rubber.

20th century
1969 - Lunar Landing Mission. Apollo 11 was the first manned mission to land on the Moon. The
first steps by humans on another planetary body were taken by Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin on July 20, 1969. The astronauts also returned to Earth the first samples from another
planetary body.

1989 - The Berlin Wall: The Fall of the Wall. On November 9, 1989, as the Cold War began to
thaw across Eastern Europe, the spokesman for East Berlin's Communist Party announced a
change in his city's relations with the West.