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Important events of history that took place in India and elsewhere on today’s date.

21 November

🇮🇳 In India

1517 Ibrahim Lodi (1517-26) succeeded the throne of Delhi, after the death of his father Sikandar Lodi.

1878 Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India, launched the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

1947 First postal stamp of independent India of three and half annas denomination was released.

1947 Major General Cariappa took over from Lieutenant General Sir Francies Tulker as the Army Commander, Eastern Command, in the rank of Lieutenant General.

1948 Raman Parimala, Indian mathematician known for her contributions to algebra, was born. She has been described as a "supreme and powerful algebraist". Early in her career, she published the first example of a nontrivial quadratic space over an affine plane. This result surprised many experts and has since led to further developments in the field.

1962 After a month of fighting along its border with India, China declared a unilateral ceasefire, bringing to an end the Sino-Indian War.

1963 First sounding rocket launched from Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS). Thus started India's space programme.

1970 Sir C V Raman, Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science in India, passed away at Bengaluru. He was the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Physics for the 1928 discovery now called Raman scattering or Raman effect which is a change in frequency observed when light is scattered in a transparent material.

1971 Indian troops aided by the Mukti Bahini, Bengali guerrillas, defeat the army of Pakistan in what came to be known as the Battle of Garibpur. This battle was fought 12 days before India officially joined the war against Pakistan.

🌎 Elsewhere

1694 Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, known best for his satirical novel Candide (1759), was born.

1783 With the Marquis d'Arlandes, Pilâtre de Rozier made the first free flight in a balloon, reaching a peak altitude of about 3,000 ft and traveling about 5.5 miles in 20 minutes.

1877 Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

1905 Albert Einstein's paper that leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula, E = mc², is published in the journal Annalen der Physik.

1906 China prohibits the opium trade.

1917 Maxim Gorky calls Vladimir Lenin a blind fanatic and unthinking adventurer.

1953 Authorities at the British Natural History Museum announce the "Piltdown Man" skull, one of the most famous fossil skulls in the world, is a hoax.

1979 A mob in the Pakistani capital Islamabad burns the US Embassy to the ground in a five-hour attack in which a US marine is killed.

⭐ Significance

World Television Day is celebrated on November 21 globally to highlight the importance of television as something beyond an electronic tool. In December 1996 the United Nations proclaimed 21 November as World Television Day commemorating the date on which the first World Television Forum was held in 1996.

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