December 14

1546: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was born. 1896: General James "Jimmy" Doolittle, famous for, amongst other things, his raid on Tokyo in 1942, was born. 1902: Laying down the first cable across the Pacific Ocean began as the British Cable Ship Silvertown left San Francisco, California, headed for Hawaii. 1922: Nobel Prize winning Russian physicist Nikolay Basov, who developed the maser, was born. 1943: American physician John Kellogg, who invented the corn flake and founded a company bearing his name, died. 1962: U.S. space probe Mariner 2 transmitted data from Venus, when it came within 22,000 miles of Venus and measured the temperature and other characteristics of the planet. 1986: Voyager, the experimental aircraft piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, took off from Edwards Air Force Base in California on the first non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world. 1999: Charles Schulz, creator of the comic strip Peanuts, announced his retirement. 2004: The Millau viaduct, the highest bridge in the world, spanning the valley of the River Tarn near Millau, France, was opened for traffic. 2006: Computer hard drive pioneer Alan Shugart died.