On this day in History:
Yes, we are a day ahead in New Zealand... check here, find out what happened tomorrow!

7 January
1610 - Galileo Galilei, Italian mathematician and astronomer (1564-1642), discovers Jupiter's four satellites: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. (How did he know what their names were?)
1785 - Dr John Jeffries and Jean Pierre Blanchard make the first crossing of the English Channel in a hot-air balloon.
1789 - First US national election is held; George Washington eventually became President. (The polls opened on December 15, 1788 and closed on January 10, 1789. It took this long because of a 'hanging chads' issue. John Adams became Vice President.
1896 - Fanny Farmer published her first cookbook. It was her most well-known work, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. A follow-up to an earlier version called Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book, published by Mary J. Lincoln in 1884, the book under Farmer's direction eventually contained 1,849 recipes, from milk toast to Zigaras à la Russe. Farmer also included essays on housekeeping, cleaning, canning and drying fruits and vegetables, and nutritional information.
1927 - Transatlantic commercial telephone service began between New York and London.
1931 - Guy Menzies becomes first person to fly solo, and first to fly a single-engine plane across the Tasman Sea, landing at Harihari.
1953 - Harry Truman announced that the U.S. had developed the hydrogen bomb.
1955 - Marian Anderson made her Metropolitan Opera debut.
1979 - Vietnamese forces captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, overthrowing Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government.
1989 - Japan's Emperor Hirohito died.
1990 - The Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to tourists for the first time in its 800-year history, for restoration work. (No, they didn't straighten it out!)
1999 - The impeachment trial of President William Clinton began in the Senate. (I wouldn't touch this one with a ten-inch cigar!)

6 January
1540 - King Henry VIII of England married his 4th wife, Anne of Cleves. (It didn't work out!)
1759 - George Washington married Martha Custis.
1838 - Samuel Morse gave the first public demonstration of the telegraph.(Although he was a politician and a painter, he is most remembered for the telegraph. On May 24, 1844, a telegraph line was officially opened as Morse sent his famous words "What hath God wrought" from the B&O Baltimore station to the Capitol Building in Washington, DC along a wire.)
1912 - New Mexico became the 47th state in the United States.
1919 - Former president Theodore Roosevelt died in Oyster Bay, N.Y.
1942 - Pan American Airways Pacific Clipper arrives in New York after making first round-the-world trip by commercial plane.
1945 - Battle of the Bulge, one of the most significant of Second World War, ends when Allied forces triumph over German fire-power.
1987 - University of California astronomers first witnessed the birth of a galaxy that contained 1 billion stars.
1994 - Figure skater Nancy Kerrigan clubbed on leg by men including husband of rival skater Tonya Harding.

5 January
1839 - George Custer, US Army general, born.
1896 - A German newspaper reported German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen's discovery of X-rays.
1914 - Henry Ford introduced the $5-a-day minimum wage.
1922 - Death of British Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton in the Falkland Islands as he attempts a fourth expedition to Antarctica.
1925 - Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first woman governor of a state (Wyoming).
1928 - First state pensions awarded to people over 65 in Britain.
1941 - Pioneer flyer AMy Johnson reported missing over Pacific; she has never been found.
1972 - President Nixon ordered the development of the space shuttle.
1998 - Sony Bono, US pop start turned politician dies.
2000 - INS Commissioner Doris Meissner ruled that 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez must be returned to Cuba.