January 8

1642: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei died. 1783: Connecticut became the first state to pass a copyright statute. 1825: American inventor Eli Whitney, whose cotton gin revolutionized the textile industry, died. 1889: The tabulating machine was patented by Dr. Herman Hollerith, who later founded IBM. 1935: A.C. Hardy received a patent for the first spectrophotometer. 1942: British theoretical cosmologist Stephen Hawking, was born. 1956: American radio pioneer Greenleaf Pickard, who invented the crystal detector, died. 1964: President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" - now there's a quagmire if there ever was one. 1980: John Mauchly, co-inventor of the ENIAC computer, died. 1982: American Telephone & Telegraph settled the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against it by agreeing to divest itself of the 22 Bell System companies (Baby Bells). 1987: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 2,000 for the first time. 1998: al Qaeda terrorist Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing, was sentenced in New York to life in prison.