December 15

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  1791: The United States Bill of Rights becomes law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.

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  1802: Mathematician and academic János Bolyai born. He will be one of the founders of non-Euclidean geometry.

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  1832: Engineer Gustave Eiffel born. He will design the world-famous Eiffel Tower.

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  1836: A fire at the U.S. Patent Office destroys all 10,000 patents and several thousand related patent models.

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  1857: Engineer George Cayley dies. He did pioneering work in aeronautics, investigating and codifying the dynamics of flight.

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  1958: Theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli dies. Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle".

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  1970: Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 successfully lands on Venus. It is the first successful soft landing on another planet.

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  2000: The third reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is shut down.