1848 – American railroad foreman Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury when an iron rod shot through his skull and obliterated the greater part of the left frontal lobe of his brain; he survived with apparently no lasting physical damage, though some claimed that his personality had changed.
1990 – The law-enforcement series Law & Order debuted on the NBC television network; the show became one of the longest-running prime-time TV dramas in the United States.
2004 – TV talk-show host Oprah Winfrey gives a brand-new Pontiac G-6 sedan, worth $28,500, to everyone in her studio audience: a total of 276 cars in all.) Oprah had told her producers to fill the crowd with people who “desperately needed” the cars, and when she announced the prize (by jumping up and down, waving a giant keyring and yelling “Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!”), mayhem–crying, screaming, delirium, fainting–broke out all around her. It was, as one media expert told a reporter, “one of the great promotional stunts in the history of television.”
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