Today is Wednesday, December 2, the 336th day of 2009. There are 29 days left in the year.

On this date

In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor.

In 1859, militant abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry the previous October.

In 1942, an artificially created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated for the first time, at the University of Chicago by physicists led by Enrico Fermi.

In 1954, the Senate voted to condemn Wisconsin Republican Joseph R. McCarthy for conduct that "tends to bring the Senate into disrepute" after his ruthless investigations of thousands of suspected Communists.

In 1969, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet got its first public preview as 191 people, most of them reporters and photographers, flew from Seattle to New York City.

In 1979, Iranians voted overwhelmingly in favour of a new constitution giving absolute power to revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In 1982, the first permanent artificial heart was implanted in Barney Clark, a Seattle dentist, by Dr William De Vries at the University of Utah.

In 1990, after German reunification, Chancellor Helmut Kohl's coalition of CDU/CSU and FDP won the first free all-German elections since 1932.

In 1993, Pablo Escobar, boss of the Medellin cocaine cartel in Colombia, was killed in a shoot-out as police tried to arrest him.

In 1999, in Northern Ireland, a power-sharing cabinet of Protestants and Catholics sat down together for the first time.

Thought for Today

"Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate." — Addison Mizner, American architect (1872-1933).