On August 2

Raúl Iturriaga, a former deputy director of the Chilean secret police, was captured in Viña del Mar after having been on the run following a kidnapping conviction.

A flash fire killed 50 people at a leisure centre in Douglas, Isle of Man.

The English rock band the Who released Who's Next, their only album to top the UK charts.

Star Dust, a British South American Airways airliner, crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes; its wreckage was not found until 1998.

Leo Szilard (pictured) penned a letter, signed by Albert Einstein and addressed to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Germany may develop atomic bombs, leading to the establishment of the Manhattan Project.

At the California Institute of Technology, American physicist Carl David Anderson proved the existence of antimatter with the discovery of the positron, for which he would receive the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Calvin Coolidge became the 30th president of the United States after Warren G. Harding suffered a fatal heart attack.

Nepalese author Krishna Lal Adhikari (pictured) was sentenced to nine years in prison for publishing a book about the cultivation of corn alleged to contain attacks on the ruling dynasty.

An explosion, blamed on Austro-Hungarian saboteurs, sank the Italian dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci.

The French army's general headquarters was activated in anticipation of war with Germany.

One of the world's earliest underground tube railways opened in the Tower Subway (interior depicted), a tunnel beneath the River Thames in London.

The first United States census was officially completed, with the nation's residential population enumerated to be 3,929,214.

While on a hunting trip in the New Forest, King William II of England was killed by an arrow through the lung loosed by one of his own men.

Unpopular among the Senate aristocracy for his reforming efforts, Roman emperor Majorian was deposed by Ricimer and executed five days later.