On This Day (April 16)

[MSFixR]

• 1178 BCE - A solar eclipse may have marked the return of Odysseus, legendary King of Ithaca, to his kingdom after the Trojan War.
• 73 - Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Jewish Revolt.
• 1853 – Indian Railways, the state-owned railway company of India, launched its first passenger service between Bombay and Thane.
• 1889 - Charles Chaplin, English actor, writer, and film producer born. (d. 1977) (Chaplin was an Academy Award-winning English comedy actor. Chaplin became one of the most famous actors as well as a notable director, composer and musician in the early to mid Hollywood cinema era. He is considered to have been one of the finest mimes and clowns ever caught on film and has greatly influenced performers in this field.)
  
  
  Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, Jr., KBE, as "The Tramp"
  
  
• 1912 – Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel.
• 1925 – A group of Bulgarian Communist Party members assaulted the St Nedelya Church in Sofia, Bulgaria during the funeral service of General Konstantin Georgiev, killing 150 people and injuring about 500 others.
• 1943 – Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered the psychedelic effects of the semisynthetic drug LSD.
• 1947 – American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch first described the post-World War II tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States as a "cold war".
• 2003 – The Treaty of Accession was signed in Athens, admitting ten new member states into the European Union.