📜 This Day in History

February 10

• 1220Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire: the city of Bukhara was captured and looted by the Mongol army of Genghis Khan.
• 1763To end the Seven Years' War, Britain, France and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris, which significantly reduced the size of the French colonial empire and marked the beginning of an extensive period of British dominance outside of Europe.
• 1906The Royal Navy battleship HMS Dreadnought was launched, representing such a marked advance in naval technology that her name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships.
• 1936Second Italo-Ethiopian War: The Battle of Amba Aradam began, ending nine days later in a decisive tactical victory for Italy and the neutralisation of almost the entire Ethiopian army as a fighting force.
• 1962Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy arrested by the FBI, was exchanged for Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the CIA spy plane that had been shot down over Soviet airspace two years earlier.
• 2009The satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 destroyed each other in the first accidental hypervelocity collision between two intact satellites in low Earth orbit.

Born on this day

• 1890Boris Pasternak, Russian poet, novelist, and literary translator Nobel Prize laureate (died 1960)
• 1894Harold Macmillan, English captain and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (died 1986)
• 1898Bertolt Brecht, German director, playwright, and poet (died 1956)
• 1902Walter Houser Brattain, Chinese-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1987)