31 December History and Importance of the Day

1600 - British East India Company chartered
1878 – Karl Benz, working in Mannheim, Germany, filed for a patent on his first reliable two-stroke gas engine, and he was granted the patent in 1879.
1879 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
1911 - Marie Curie receives her 2nd Nobel Prize
The second Nobel prize is for chemistry while the first is in Physics
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1903/marie-curie-bio.html

1930 - US tobacco industry produced 123 billion cigarettes in 1930
1946 - President of USA declared official end of Wold War II.
1955 - The General Motors Corporation becomes the first U.S. corporation to make over $1 billion USD in a year.
1963 – The Central African Federation officially collapses, subsequently becoming Zambia, Malawi and Rhodesia.
1991 – All official Soviet Union institutions  ceased operations by this date and the Soviet Union was officially dissolved.
1992 – Czechoslovakia is peacefully dissolved creating of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
1998 – The European Exchange Rate Mechanism freezes the values of the legacy currencies in the Eurozone, and establishes the value of the euro currency.
1999 - Boris Yeltsin resigns as President of Russia, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the acting President


Birthdays

1943 – Ben Kingsley, English actor - He played the role of Gandhi in Attenborough's Gandhi.
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New York Times http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/on-this-day/december-31/

BBC News 31 Dec: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/31/default.stm


31 December Knowledge History - Science, Engineering and Management
http://nraombakc.blogspot.in/2012/11/31-december-knowledge-history-science.html