1901 -- The American inventor King Camp Gillette applied for the patent for the first safety razor, which had a double-edged disposable blade.

1910 -- The neon lamp, developed by the French physicist Georges Claude, was displayed for the first time, at the Paris Motor Show.

1912 -- Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro signed an armistice ending the first Balkan War.

1967 -- The South African surgeon Christiaan Barnard carried out the world's first heart transplant in Cape Town. The patient, Louis Washkansky, lived for 18 days.

1979 -- Iranian electors voted overwhelmingly in favor of a new constitution giving absolute power to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

1980 -- Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists before World War II, died.

1984 -- A gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant near Bhopal, India, killed at least 3,000 people and disabled thousands.

1989 -- Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev hailed their first summit, in Washington, as the start of a new era in U.S.-Soviet relations.

1995 -- Former South Korean president Chun Doo Hwan was arrested on charges of military rebellion stemming from a 1979 coup and a later army massacre.

1996 -- Former Afghan communist leader Babrak Karmal, who personified the Kremlin's ill-fated 9-year intervention in Afghanistan, died in oblivion in Moscow.

2004 -- Pakistan and India agreed to reopen a rail link severed nearly 40 years earlier between Munabao in Rajasthan state and Khokrapar in southern Pakistan.