February 23 in History

February 23 is the 54th day of the year There are 312 days remaining until the end of the year.

• 632 – The Last Sermon (Khutbah, Khutbatul Wada’) of the prophet Muhammad.
• 1455 – The Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type, was published.
• 1836 – The Battle of the Alamo began in San Antonio, Texas.
• 1861 – President-elect Abraham Lincoln secretly arrived in Washington, DC, after thwarting an assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland.
• 1883 – Alabama became the first US state to enact an antitrust law.
• 1886 – Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of man-made aluminum, after several years of intensive work. He was assisted in this project by his older sister Julia Brainerd Hall.
• 1898 – Emile Zola was imprisoned in France after publishing J’accuse, a letter accusing the French government of anti-Semitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus. 
• 1903 – Cuba leased Guantanamo Bay to the United States "in perpetuity.”
• 1905 – Chicago attorney Paul Harris and three other businessmen met for lunch to form the Rotary Club, the world's first service club.
• 1927 – The Federal Radio Commission (later renamed the Federal Communications Commission) began to regulate the use of radio frequencies in the US.
• 1941 – Plutonium was first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg. 
• 1942 – Japanese submarines fired artillery shells at the California coastline near Santa Barbara.
• 1947 – The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was founded.
• 1954 – The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine began in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
• 1983 – The US Environmental Protection Agency announced its intent to buy out and evacuate the dioxin-contaminated community of Times Beach, Missouri.