Eight years after permission had been granted to build, the Metropolitan Railway opened its first section of underground railway linking the mainline railway station of Paddington to the new underground station at Farringdon in the financial district of the City of London. Using steam engines pulling gas-lit carriages, the new line carried 38,000 people on its first day.  The network expanded swiftly through the nineteenth century and today boasts 250 miles of track across the Greater London area.  (By John Osborne) 

Receiving reports of murders of trekking miners by members of the Shoshone tribe, Colonel P. Edward Connor marched his California volunteer troops from Salt Lake City in freezing temperatures to the Cache Valley, in today's Franklin County, Idaho, to confront the largest concentration of the tribe in the area. The battle was initially fierce but after the Shoshone ran out of ammunition degenerated into a massacre. Twenty-one soldiers were killed but almost three hundred Shoshone men, women, and children dies, many murdered after the fighting.  (By John Osborne) 

A celebration was held in Cleveland, Ohio as the three companies of the Atlantic and Great Western Railway completed the railway link between Cleveland and New York. Governor Yates, together with General Rosecrans, and Senator John Sherman attended. The companies, from New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, had as their goal a direct line from St. Louis to New York and this connection was made the following June.  (By John Osborne)  

The riverboat Sunny Side sailed from Memphis upriver to St Louis with ninety cabin passengers and a sizeable load of baled cotton.  During the night, near Carruthersville, Missouri, sparks from the boiler blew into the cotton and by five in the morning the vessel was afire. As the crew attempted to steer the Sunny Side to shore, passengers took to the river to escape the fire and many were drowned.  Of thirteen women aboard nine died from fire catching their clothing or drowning.  In total twenty-five lives were lost.  (By John Osborne)  

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote his poem "I heard the Bells of Christmas Day" during the day.  Clearly troubled with the continuing blood letting of the Civil War, which included the severe wounding of his only son, his words reference the horror of the conflict but also the hope that Christmas brought to him. Despite this, the poem, published later in early 1864, when set to music became a very popular Christmas carol, sung up to this day.  (By John Osborne)

The Church of the Company of Jesus in the Chilean capital of Santiago, Chile was packed with more than three thousand citizens, mostly female, for services commemorating the the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.  At around 7 p.m. a fire broke out around the altar and flames swept through the building.  Fatally, all doors in the Church opened inward and panic made escape virtually impossible.  Between two and three thousand people died in the fire, thought to be the single greatest ever human loss to fire in a single building.  (By John Osborne) 

Henry Ford was born to an Anglo-Irish immigrant farming family near Dearborn, Michigan.  He left the farm after his mother's death and took up a varied early career in engineering, initially with the Edison Company.  He became interested in the automobile and after several attempts, founded his successful Ford Motor Company in 1903 and in 1908 introduced his iconic and transformative "Model T" car.  A complex man - he was a pacifist but also an anti-Semite decorated by Hitler - he died in April 1947 and is buried in Detroit. (By John Osborne)

Archduke Franz Ferdinand was born into the Austrian ruling house and in 1889 became the heir to the Imperial throne of Austria-Hungary.  His assassination in Sarajevo in current-day Bosnia just over fifty years later precipitated the July Crisis that brought on the First World War.  (By John Osborne)