On this day in 1904, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala in Milan, generating negative reviews that forced him to rewrite the opera.
On this day in 1959, Vanguard 2, the first weather satellite, was launched to measure cloud cover distribution.
On this day in 2006, a massive landslide in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte killed over 1,000 people.