On This Day in:

1606 – England adopted the original Union Jack as its flag.

1770 – The British Parliament repealed the Townsend Acts.

1782 – The British navy won its only naval engagement against the colonists in the American Revolution at the Battle of Saints, off Dominica.

1799 – Phineas Pratt patented the comb cutting machine.

1811 – The first colonists arrived at Cape Disappointment, Washington.

1833 – Charles Gaylor patented the fireproof safe.

1861 – Fort Sumter was shelled by Confederacy, starting America's Civil War.

1864 – Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest captured Fort Pillow, in Tennessee and slaughters the black Union troops there.

1877 – A catcher's mask was used in a baseball game for the first time by James Alexander Tyng.

1911 – Pierre Prier completed the first non-stop London-Paris flight in three hours and 56 minutes.

1916 – American cavalrymen and Mexican bandit troops clashed at Parrel, Mexico.

1927 – The British Cabinet came out in favor of women voting rights.

1934 – F. Scott Fitzgerald novel 'Tender Is the Night' was first published.

1938 – The first U.S. law requiring a medical test for a marriage license was enacted in New York.

1944 – The U.S. Twentieth Air Force was activated to begin the strategic bombing of Japan.

1945 – In New York, the organization of the first eye bank, the Eye Bank for Sight Restoration, was announced.

1945 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Spring, GA.

He died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 63. Harry S Truman became president.

1955 – The University of Michigan Polio Vaccine Evaluation Center announced that the polio vaccine of Dr. Jonas Salk was 'safe, effective and potent.'