On This Day, Jan. 25: American Airlines makes first commercial transcontinental flight

Jan. 25 (UPI) -- On this date in history:

In 1533, Henry VIII of England secretly married Anne Boleyn, his second wife.

In 1858, Mendelssohn's "The Wedding March" was played at the marriage of Friedrich of Prussia and England's Princess Victoria, the daughter of Queen Victoria. It became a standard theme for weddings.

In 1890, Nellie Bly, a young New York reporter, completed a trip around the world that lasted 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes.

File Photo by Library of Congress/UPI

In 1909, President-elect William Howard Taft sailed for Panama to plot a course forward following the completion of the canal.

In 1915, transcontinental phone service was inaugurated by Alexander Graham Bell in a hookup between New York and San Francisco.

In 1924, the first Winter Olympic Games opened in Chamonix, France.

In 1947, gangster Al "Scarface" Capone died at age 48 after suffering from syphilis.

In 1959, the first scheduled transcontinental passenger jet flight took place, a non-stop American Airlines trip from California to New York.

In 1961, newly inaugurated U.S. President John Kennedy had the first televised presidential news conference.

UPI File Photo

In 1993, a man with a rifle opened fire near the main CIA gate in Langley, Va., killing two agency employees and injuring three others.

In 2004, Opportunity, the second of two NASA robot explorers, landed on Mars, joining its twin to explore the planet.

In 2006, the militant Islamic group Hamas, calling for destruction of Israel, scored a stunning victory in the Palestinian parliamentary election.

In 2010, the man known as "Chemical Ali" -- Ali Hassan al-Majid, cousin and aide to Saddam Hussein -- was executed in Iraq for his role in a poison-gas attack in which 5,000 Kurds were killed.

In 2011, thousands of Egyptian citizens, expressing their dissatisfaction with the government, clashed with riot police in Cairo, Alexandria, and other cities throughout the country. This rebellion, locally referred to as the January 25 Revolution, would lead to the ousting of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak less than three weeks later.

In 2018, the Bulletin of the Atomic scientists reset its Doomsday Clock 30 minutes forward, to 2 minutes to midnight. The organization cited The Trump administration's inability to "develop coordinate and clearly communicate a coherent foreign, much less nuclear, policy" as the reason for symbolically moving humanity closer to annihilation.