August 6

1766: William Wollaston, discoverer of palladium and rhodium, was born. 1806: The Holy Roman Empire went out of existence as Emperor Francis I abdicated. 1881: Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, was born. 1890: The electric chair was used for the first time to execute murderer William Kemmler, in NY. 1934: U.S. troops left Haiti, which had been occupied since 1915. 1935: William Coolidge obtained patent for the cathode ray tube. 1945: The American B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" dropped the first atomic bomb (nicknamed "Little Boy") over the center of Hiroshima, Japan, marking the beginning of the end of the war begun four years earlier with the massacre at Pearl Harbor. 1961: Russian cosmonaut Gherman Titov orbited the earth 20 times, just four months after Yuri Gagarin made his historic venture. 1996: NASA announced that life may have existed on Mars. 1997: Apple Computer and Microsoft agreed to share technology in a deal giving Microsoft a stake in Apple's survival.