Major events of May 18 in Indian and World history

New Delhi: The major events of May 18 in Indian and world history are as follows:

1842 – Birth of Mahadev Govind Ranade, a great scholar of Maharashtra.
1778- James Cook discovers the ‘Hawaiian Islands’ and names it ‘Sandwich Island’.
1896 – ‘X-ray machine’ first performed.
1911 – US pilot Eugene Burton Alley launches the aircraft for the first time on the flying platform of the war ship Pennsylvania, standing in San Francisco Bay.
1930- Rabindranath Tagore visited the Sabarmati Ashram of Mahatma Gandhi.
1938 – The last batch of political prisoners left for the mainland from Port Blair in Andaman and Nicobar.
1947 – Death of famous actor and singer Kundan Lal Sehgal of his time in Jalandhar.
1968 – The US and the Soviet Union agree on a draft treaty for nuclear weapons control.
1976 – France expels 40 Soviet officers from the country on charges of espionage.
1991 – Iraq’s Scud missiles attack two of Israel’s cities, Tel Aviv and Haifa, raising the possibility of Israel’s involvement in the Gulf War.
2002 – US agrees to provide state-of-the-art weapons to India.
2002 – Announcement of the end of civil war in Sierra Leone, in which more than 50 thousand people were killed and about 2 million people were rendered homeless.
2009 – The Sri Lankan army defeated the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and thus ended the Sri Lankan civil war after 26 years of military operations.
2012 – Social networking company Facebook Inc. begins trading on Nasdaq.