Wednesday, September 5, 1691

California wildfires: A pyrotechnic device at a gender reveal party ignited the El Dorado Fire (pictured), burning for 71 days and killing one firefighter.

Mandala Airlines Flight 091 crashed shortly after take-off in Indonesia due to pilot error, killing 100 out of the 117 people on board along with 49 more on the ground.

NASA launched the space probe Voyager 1, currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth, from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

Squeaky Fromme (pictured), a devotee of Charles Manson, attempted to assassinate U.S. president Gerald Ford in Sacramento, California.

The Palestinian militant group Black September took hostage eleven Israeli athletes and coaches at the Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany; all of the hostages were killed less than 24 hours later.

During the practice session of the Italian Grand Prix at Monza Circuit, Jochen Rindt was killed and subsequently became motor racing's only posthumous world champion.

Hurricane Cleo dissipated after causing 156 deaths, mainly in Haiti, and causing roughly US$187 million in damages across the Caribbean and southeastern United States.

World War II: American and Australian airborne forces landed at Nadzab as part of the New Guinea campaign against Japan.

Forty-eight people died in a fire in a makeshift cinema in Dromcolliher, Ireland.

The Zimmerwald Conference, the first of three international socialist conferences forming the Zimmerwald movement, opened in Switzerland.

The Casablanca Fair (poster pictured) opened in the French protectorate in Morocco.

Under the mediation of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, the Russo-Japanese War officially ended with the signing of a treaty at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine.