On Jan. 25, 1759, Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet, was born in Alloway, Scotland.
In 1882 novelist Virginia Woolf was born in London.
In 1915 telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell inaugurated U.S. transcontinental telephone service.
In 1947 mobster Al Capone died in Palm Island, Fla.
In 1959 American Airlines opened America’s jet age with the transcontinental flight of a Boeing 707.
In 1961 President John Kennedy held the first presidential news conference carried live on radio and TV.
In 1971 Charles Manson and three followers were convicted in Los Angeles of murder and conspiracy in the 1969 slayings of seven people.
In 1981 the 52 Americans held hostage by Iran for 444 days arrived in the U.S.
In 1990 actress Ava Gardner died at 67 in London.
In 1993 a Pakistani gunman killed two CIA employees outside agency headquarters in Virginia. (Mir Aimal Kasi was later convicted and executed.) Also, President Bill Clinton appointed his wife, Hillary, to head a committee on health-care reform.
In 1996 playwright Jonathan Larson (“Rent”) died at 35 in New York.
In 2004 NASA’s Opportunity rover zipped its first pictures of Mars to Earth, showing a surface smooth and dark red in some places, and strewn with fragmented slabs of light bedrock in others.
