Moments in Time

The History Channel

• On Aug. 9, 1936, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, black American track star Jesse Owens wins his fourth gold medal of the Games in the 4-by-100-meter relay. His relay team set a new world record of 39.8 seconds, which stood for 20 years.

• On Aug. 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world’s first atom bomb over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Some 80,000 people are killed as a result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least 60,000 more would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the radioactive fallout.

• On Aug. 7, 1959, the U.S. unmanned spacecraft Explorer 6 is launched into an orbit around the Earth. The spacecraft featured a scanner that transmitted a crude picture of the Earth’s surface from a distance of 17,000 miles. The photo, received in Hawaii, took nearly 40 minutes to transmit.

• On Aug. 11, 1965, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, a riot began that eventually ranged over a 50-square-mile area. With the assistance of thousands of National Guardsmen, order was restored five days later. The violence left 34 dead, 1,032 injured, nearly 4,000 arrested and $40 million worth of property destroyed.

• On Aug. 8, 1974, President Richard Nixon announces his intention to become the first president in American history to resign. With impeachment proceedings under way against him for his involvement in the Watergate affair, Nixon finally bowed to pressure from the public and Congress to leave the White House.

• On Aug. 10, 1981, Pete Rose of the Philadelphia Phillies gets the 3,631st hit of his baseball career, breaking Stan Musial’s record for most hits by a National Leaguer. It was only Rose’s 2,886th game; it had taken Musial 3,026 games to set the mark.

• On Aug. 12, 1990, fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovers three huge bones jutting out of a cliff in South Dakota. They turned out to be part of the largest Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered, a 65 million-year-old specimen. Amazingly, the skeleton was more than 90 percent complete.

(c) 2012 King Features Synd., Inc.