THURSDAY, Sept.10, 2026

1776-George Washington asks for a spy, and Nathan Hale volunteers

1813-American naval commander Oliver Hazard Perry defeats the British in the Battle of Lake Erie

1846-Elias Howe takes out a U.S. patent for a lockstitch sewing machine

1924-Leopold and Loeb are found guilty of the murder of Bobby Franks in Chicago in "the crime of the century"

1965-Great Britain performs a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site in the U.S.

1976-Five Croatian terrorists hijack TWA flight 355 from LaGuardia Airport, New York headed to Chicago, Illinois to advocate Croat independence from Yugoslavia; plane redirected to Paris, France where arrests are made

1977-Hamida Djandoubi, convicted of torture and murder, is the last person to be executed by guillotine in France

2008-The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in the history of mankind, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland

2020-California's August Complex wildfire becomes the largest recorded in state history at 471,000 acres (736 square miles)