On Aug. 31, 1887, Thomas Edison received a patent for his Kinetoscope, a device that produced moving pictures.
In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt signed an act prohibiting the export of U.S. arms to belligerents.
In 1954 Hurricane Carol hit the northeastern Atlantic states. (Connecticut, Rhode Island and part of Massachusetts bore the brunt of the storm, which resulted in nearly 70 deaths.)
In 1972, at the Munich Summer Olympics, American swimmer Mark Spitz won his fourth and fifth gold medals, in the 100-meter butterfly and 800-meter freestyle relay.
In 1986 82 people were killed when an Aeromexico jetliner and a small private plane collided over Cerritos, Calif. Also in 1986 the Soviet passenger ship Admiral Nakhimov collided with a merchant vessel in the Black Sea, causing both vessels to sink; up to 448 people reportedly died.
In 1995 at the O.J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles, Judge Lance Ito ruled the defense could play only two examples of police detective Mark Fuhrman’s racist comments from taped conversations with a screenwriter.
In 2005 about 1,000 people were killed when a religious procession across a Baghdad bridge was engulfed in panic over rumors of a suicide bomber.
