Template:Selected anniversaries/January 4
1847: Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the United States government.
1903: Topsy, an elephant, is electrocuted by the owners of Luna Park, Coney Island. The event is documented in the film Electrocuting an Elephant.
1932: Mathematician and academic Shoshichi Kobayashi born. He will work on Riemannian and complex manifolds, transformation groups of geometric structures, and Lie algebras.
1958: Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from orbit.
1959: Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.
1961: Physicist and academic Erwin Schrödinger dies. He was awarded the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics for the formulation of the Schrödinger equation.
1974: Watergate scandal: United States President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over
- Materials subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.
2002: Capacitor plague affects several brands of portable envy devices.
2003: George Plimpton published first in prize-winning series of articles on capacitor plague.