On this day in 1894, the first ever commercial motion picture house opened in New York City using ten Kinetoscopes, a device for viewing films.
On this day in 1912, the British passenger liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic at 23:40.
On this day in 1958, the Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 fell from orbit after a mission duration of 162 days. This was the first spacecraft to carry a living animal, a dog named Laika. The female dog likely lived only a few hours.