On This Day

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

20 April

🇮🇳 In India

1888 Heavy rain of hailstones resulted in huge loss of lives in Moradabad, Uttar Pradesh.

1914 Gopinath Mohanty—winner of the Jnanpith award, and the first winner of the National Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955, for his novel Amrutara Santana—was born in Cuttack.

1960 Pannalal Ghosh, flute player and composer, died. He was a disciple of Allauddin Khan, and is credited with popularizing the flute as a concert instrument in Hindustani classical music and also the "Pioneer of Indian Classical Flute".

1970 Shakeel Badayuni, Urdu poet, lyricist and songwriter in Hindi and Urdu language films, died in Mumbai.

🌎 Elsewhere

1841 Edgar Allen Poe's first detective story, Murders in Rue Morgue, was published.

1889 Adolf Hitler, leader of National Socialist Party (1921-1945), was born in Braunau, Austria. He was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933-1945 and started World War II by invading Poland. He committed suicide in his Berlin bunker.

1902 Pierre and Marie Curie discover the radioactive element radium. In 1903, the French couple received the Nobel Prize in Physics for their pioneering research.

1940 The first electron microscope was demonstrated in Philadelphia, US.

1951 A human organ is surgically replaced for the first time. Romanian surgeon Dan Gavriliu used a section of the stomach to bypass the esophagus.

2010 The Deepwater Horizon oil rig, located in the Gulf of Mexico, exploded, resulting in the death of 11 workers and the largest spill of oil in the history of marine oil drilling operations. After several failed efforts to contain the flow, the well was declared sealed on 19 September 2010. But reports in early 2012 indicated that the well site was still leaking. It is regarded as one of the largest environmental disasters in American history.

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