01011210 This Day In History, December 10

1508: Pope Julius II, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, Louis XII of France and Ferdinand II of Aragon formed the League of Cambrai to attack Venice (see Emperors and Popes and The Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation).

1520: Martin Luther publicly burned Pope Leo X's papal edict, Exsurge Domine, that ordered him to recant his "protestant heresies." The accusation against Luther was fundamentally incorrect; Luther rebelled against the immoral behavior of the Papacy at the time, but he maintained nearly all of the Church of Rome's pagan doctrines, as do the "Protestant" churches to this day (e.g. see Why Observe The True Sabbath? and Why Call Me, Lord, Lord, and Do Not The Things Which I Say?). That's why the LORD refers to the "Protestant" churches as "harlots" too: "17:4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: 17:5 And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH." (Revelation 17:4-5 KJV). The Church of Rome is the "mother" of all of those harlots, while Luther was the "father" of many of them.

1665: The Royal Netherlands Marine Corps was founded by Michiel de Ruyter.

1684: Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws from his theory of gravity, detailed in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, was read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.

1799: France adopted the metre as its official unit of length.

1845: The first pneumatic (inflated with air) tires were patented by British civil engineer Robert Thompson.

1848: Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of emperor Napoleon, was elected President of France's Second Republic. It was to be short lived - in 1851 Bonaparte staged a coup to restore "the empire."

1865: German-born Leopold I, the first king of the Belgians and a highly influential force in European diplomacy, died. He was known as the "uncle of Europe" - among his many international royal relatives was his niece Queen Victoria of Britain.

1868: The world's first traffic lights, built near London's Parliament Square, began operation.

1896: Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel died. He made much of his fortune from his invention of dynamite and the manufacture of armaments of war in his factories. Ironically (or hypocritically), the "Nobel Peace Prize" is named after him.

1898: The U.S. and Spain signed a treaty to end their war in the Caribbean and the Pacific.

1901: The first transatlantic wireless signal was received at St. John's Newfoundland. Guglielmo Marconi flew a box kite trailing copper wire to a telephone picked up clicking sounds transmitted from 2,000 miles / 3,200 kilometers away in Cornwall, England. Today, the hill from which the kite was flown is called Signal Hill.

1913: The "Mona Lisa" painting was recovered in Florence after having been stolen from the Louvre two years earlier.

1915: The first all-metal plane flew for the first time. Built by German Hugo Junkers, it was known as the "Tin Donkey."

1936: King Edward VIII of Britain abdicated to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson.

1941: Japanese shore-based bombers sank the British battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse.

1982: 119 countries, but not Britain or the U.S., signed the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

1988: A severe earthquake in Armenia killed an estimated 100,000 people.