Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe Today is Aug. 6 The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on this day in 1945. It was the first time in history that a city had suffered a nuclear attack, and one of only two times that has happened down to this day. Japan did not surrender, ending World War II, until nine days later after a second bomb was dropped -- on the city of Nagasaki. Advertisement Italy invaded Somalia -- starting the Battle of North Africa in World War II -- on this day in 1940. In those days, it was called Somaliland and it was a British possession. It was back in 1890 that William Kemmier became the first person executed by an electric chair, at Auburn Prison in New York. He had been convicted of killing his girlfriend. William Schroeder died of a stroke in Louisville, Ky., on this day in 1986 ... after 620 days with the Jarvik-7 mechanical heart. He was the longest-living permanent artificial heart patient. In 1996, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin announced the discovery of evidence of a primitive life form on Mars, a fossil found on a meteorite in Antartica believed to have landed billions of years ago. Advertisement The UN Security Council voted on this day in 1990 to impose an economic and military embargo on Iraq as punishment for its invasion of Kuwait. Gertrude Ederle of New York became the first American to swim the English Channel on this day in 1926. We now return you to the present, already in progress.
