On this day - Lt Gen Raj Kadyan

The act of taking the first step is what separates the winners from the losers.

On this day 11 Dec....

1769 - Venetian blinds were patented in London by Edward Bevan. (Venetian blinds were known to the French long before then. In 1761, St. Peter's Church, Philadelphia also had such blinds).

1844 - The first dental anaesthetic, nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") was used by Dr. John M. Riggs for a tooth extraction on Dr Horace Wells. (The previous day, Wells had attended a demonstration of the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide gas. At this demonstration, Horace Wells noticed that a man intoxicated by the nitrous oxide suffered a laceration to his leg, and claimed to feel no pain. To test the potential of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic, Wells arranged for Colton to administer nitrous oxide to Wells himself)

1901 - Guglielmo Marconi, the Italian electrical inventor, sends the first transatlantic radio signal. (An inventor and electrical engineer, known for his pioneering work on long-distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Often credited as the inventor of radio. Shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun).

1911 - Marie Curie became the first person to be awarded a second Nobel prize.  (This second prize was for her individual achievements in Chemistry, whereas her first prize (1903) was a collaborative effort with her husband Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel in Physics).

1913 - "Mona Lisa", stolen from the Louvre Museum in 1911, recovered. (Vincenzo Peruggia, the  Italian thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa on 21 August 1911. It was described as the greatest art theft of the 20th century.  During interrogation after his arrest, Peruggia said he entered the museum on Monday, August 21 around 7 am through the door where the other Louvre workers were entering. He wore one of the white worker's mocks that museum employees customarily wore. When the Salon Carré where the Mona Lisa hung was empty, he removed the painting from the wall and walked out of a nearby service staircase).

1958 - Wilson Jones became India's first individual World Champion when he won the Amateur Billiards Championship.

1967 - The Concorde, a joint British-French venture and the world's first supersonic airliner, was unveiled in Toulouse, France.( It featured a maximum speed over twice the speed of sound at 1,553 mph, with seating for 92 to 128 passengers. (Concorde entered service in 1976 and continued commercial flights for 27 years. It is one of only two supersonic transports to have ever entered commercial service; the other was the Tupolev Tu-144, which ran for a much shorter period of time, before being grounded and retired due to safety and budget issues).

1971 - The elite para-commandos and parachute battalions -India's 'Red Devils', as they are affectionately called, have an unsurpassed ethos and elan of their own. 2 Para Battalion executed a superb airborne assault operation at Tangail in East Pakistan, which was the first of its kind in the subcontinent.

1981 - Muhammad Ali's 61st & last fight, losing to the Jamaican boxer Trevor Berbick in a unanimous 10-round decision. (First winning the heavyweight title in 1964, Ali had successfully defended it eight times before he was convicted of draft evasion in 1967.  Inactive for two years he announced his retirement in 1970. Regained his  title in 1974. After losing and regaining the crown again in 1978, Ali announced his retirement for the second time but reemerged in October 1980 to fight a championship bout against Larry Holmes, who knocked him out in the 11th round. Ali refused to accept the result, however, and pushed to set up the fight with Berbick in the Bahamas in order to prove himself).

1987 - Rajiv Gandhi Government defeats the first ever no-confidence motion.

1991 - The centre notifies the interim order of the Cauvery Water Disputes Tribunal directing Karnataka to release 205 tmc ft of water to Tamil Nadu.

1997 -  More than 150 countries agreed at a global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan to control the Earth's greenhouse gases. After nearly two weeks of negotiations, delegates announced they had reached a deal to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced world wide.

Born....

1922 - Dilip Kumar, film actor.

1931 - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh "Osho", guru of the rich.

1935 - President Pranab Mukherjee.

1969 - Vishwanathan Anand, chess grandmaster.

RIP....

1998 - Poet Pradeep (Ramchandra Divedi).

2004 - M.S. Subbulakshmi, singer.

2012 - Ravi Shankar, musician.

Titbits....

2009 - Tiger Woods announced an indefinite leave from professional golf to focus on his marriage.

Good morning. Have a nice day.
Lt Gen Raj Kadyan