February 9

• 

  1555: Christian Egenolff dies. He was the first important printer and publisher operating from Frankfurt-am-Main.

• 

  1619: Physician and philosopher Lucilio Vanini is put to death after being found guilty of atheism and blasphemy. He was the first literate proponent of the thesis that humans evolved from apes.

• 

  1737: Thomas Paine born. He will author the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and inspire the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain.

• 

  1907: Mathematician and academic Harold Scott MacDonald Coxeter born. He will become of the greatest geometers of the 20th century.

• 

  1913: A group of meteors is visible across much of the eastern seaboard of North and South America, leading astronomers to conclude the source had been a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth.

• 

  1927: Computer scientist and academic David Wheeler born. He will contribute to the development of the Electronic delay storage automatic calculator (EDSAC) and the Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT); help develop the subroutine; and gave the first explanation of how to design software libraries.

• 

  1969: Premiere of The Courtship of Eddie's Carpenter, an American home improvement comedy romance television series based on the 1963 "Courtship Carpentry" fad of the same name.

• 

  1979: Physicist and engineer Dennis Gabor dies. He invented holography, for which he received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.

• 

  2010: Businessman Walter Frederick Morrison dies. Morrison invented the Frisbee. The first version, a cake pan purchased for a nickle and sold for a quarter, was known as the Flyin' Cake Pan.