September 16

1498 Tomás de Torquemada died at  the monastery of St. Thomas Aquinas in Ávilon on September 16, 1498. The Castilian Dominican friar was the first president of the Spanish Inquisition, which resulted in the execution of 3,000 to 5,000 persons deemed to be heretics and the expulsion from Spain of tens of thousands of people of Jewish and Muslim faith and heritage.

Tomás de Torquemad

1620 The Pilgrim Fathers set sail from Plymouth, England on the Mayflower for the New World on September 16, 1620. Some of them were fleeing from religious persecution, others were looking for adventure or a new path to wealth and riches. The ship was tiny, with a deck just 90ft long. Even so, this small ship took 102 English Separatists to the New World, as well as its crew of 25-30. The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock three months later and established there a permanent English colony.

1701 James II of England (James VII of Scotland) died of a brain haemorrhage on September 16, 1701. After being deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, James was received in France by his cousin and ally, Louis XIV, who granted him a palace and a pension. James' body was laid to rest in a triple sarcophagus (consisting of two wooden coffins and one of lead) at the Chapel of Saint Edmund in the Church of the English Benedictines in the Rue St. Jacques in Paris. 

1714 German physicist Daniel Fahrenheit died on September 16, 1736.  In 1714, he constructed the mercury thermometer, the first sealed thermometer after discovering a method for cleaning mercury so that it would not stick to a glass tube.

Thermometer of Lyon (1743). By Science Museum of London 

1782 The famous Italian castrati, Farinelli, died on September 16, 1782. Christened Carlo Broschi, he took the surname of his benefactors, the brothers Farina, as his stage name. With a voice spanning three octaves and incredibly powerful lungs Farinelli could hold a note for a minute without a break. Farielli used to sing for King Philip V of Spain to sleep at night with the same four songs.

1813 Oil lamps of a crude sort have been known since pre-Roman times. In 1780 a Frenchman named Ami Argand devised a much-improved oil lamp. They were first adopted by the well-to-do, but soon spread to the middle classes and eventually the less well-off as well. Jane Austen may have preferred the more domestic candle. In a letter from London, September 16, 1813 she wrote, “It is to be a quiet evening - my eyes are tired of dust and lamps.”

1857 The words and music for "Jingle Bells" were originally written by Unitarian composer James S. Pierpont for a local Sunday school entertainment on Thanksgiving Day in Savannah, Georgia. It was published  under the song's original title of "One Horse Open Sleigh." on September 16, 1857. Its catchy tune was soon taken up by Christmas revelers.

1863 Robert College of Istanbul, Turkey was founded on September 16, 1863 by Dr. Cyrus Hamlin, an American missionary and educator, with the support of Christopher Rhinelander Robert, a wealthy American merchant. The institution is the oldest American school still in existence in its original location outside the United States.

1908 General Motors was founded on September 16, 1908, in Flint, Michigan, as a holding company for McLaughlin Car Company of Canada Limited and Buick, then controlled by William C. Durant.  General Motors currently produces vehicles in 37 countries; its core under brands include Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC.

1924 The Hollywood actress Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924. Howard Hawks managed the young actress early in her career. He changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose "Bacall", a Romanian variant of her mother's maiden name.

Photo of Lauren Bacall in 1945

1932 Scottish physician Sir Ronald Ross died on September 16, 1932. Ross located in 1897 the malaria parasite in the spotted winged Anopheles mosquito. He revealed that the ailment is carried in the mosquito's salivary glands and transferred to healthy birds through biting them. He won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the mosquito's role in carrying and transmitting malaria.

1937 The first live television broadcast of an association football match by the BBC took place on September 16, 1937. The match was a specially arranged fixture between Arsenal and Arsenal Reserves. It was only broadcast to a limited number of viewers in the London area, as TV sets were still a rare luxury at the time. The BBC was still in its experimental phase of live sports broadcasting, and this match was part of its efforts to test the potential of television.

1941 Vermont declared war on Germany months before Pearl Harbor. On September 16, 1941, Vermont’s Legislature reinterpreted a military order issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to establish a state of armed conflict with Germany.

1955 A Soviet Zulu-IV class submarine became the first sub to launch a ballistic missile when it blasted an R-11FM (naval variant of the SS-1 Scud) on September 16, 1955. This event marked a significant milestone in naval and missile technology during the Cold War era

1961 Typhoon Nancy, with possibly the strongest winds ever measured in a tropical cyclone, made initial landfall in Muroto, Kōchi, Japan on September 16, 1961, having decreased in intensity. A reconnaissance aircraft flying into the typhoon near its peak intensity four days earlier determined Nancy's one-minute sustained winds to be 185 knots (215 mph; 345 km/h), which if correct were the highest wind speeds ever measured in a tropical cyclone.

1963 Six years after the Federation of Malaya gained its independence from the United Kingdom, the country of Malaysia was formed from the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, British North Borneo (Sabah) and Sarawakon September 16, 1963.

1975 The New Guinea island is divided among two countries: Papua New Guinea to the east, and Indonesia to the west. On September 16, 1975, Australia granted full independence to Papua New Guinea.

1977 Opera singer Maria Callas spent her last years living largely in isolation in her Paris apartment. She died aged 53 on September 16, 1977, of a heart attack without receiving medical attention. Her ashes were scattered over the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece, according to her wishes.

1979 Rap music is a style of popular music that developed in the Bronx, New York City, in the 1970s and slowly spread across the country. The first rap records were made in 1979 by small, independent record companies. The Sugar Hill Gang released the first commercial rap hit, "Rapper's Delight," on September 16, 1979 bringing rap off the New York streets and into the mainstream popular music scene.

1983 On February 13, 1981, 11-year-old Donna Griffiths of Pershore, England, caught a cold and started sneezing. She carried on sneezing until September 16, 1983, 978 days later. It's still the world sneezing record.

1989 Boris Yeltsin abandoned communism partly due to a visit on September 16, 1989, to a medium-sized grocery store (Randall's) in Clear Lake, Houston, Texas. Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his 2000 biography, Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life. "On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the 'pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments'."

1994 The hole in the ozone layer was discovered above the Antarctic in 1985 and The Montreal Protocol to ban ozone-depleting chemicals such as CFCs was signed four years later. The United Nations General Assembly in 1994 designated September 16 as International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer.

Ozone hole over Southern Hemisphere 1957-2001

According to research by the greetings card company Moonpig September 16th is the most common day for a birthday in the UK.