Today in History....December 1

On this day in …

1824, the presidential election was turned over to the U.S. House of Representatives when a deadlock developed between John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford and Henry Clay. (Adams ended up the winner.)

1904, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis closed after seven months and some 20 million visitors
1913, the first drive-in automobile service station, built by Gulf Refining Co., opened in Pittsburgh

1921, the Navy flew the first nonrigid dirigible to use helium; the C-7 traveled from Hampton Roads, Va., to Washington

1934, Soviet communist official Sergei M. Kirov, an associate of Josef Stalin, was assassinated in Leningrad, resulting in a massive purge

1943, President Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin concluded their Tehran conference

1955, Rosa Parks, a black seamstress, refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus. Mrs. Parks was arrested, sparking a yearlong boycott of the buses by blacks

1964, in two crucial meetings (on this day and two days later) at the White House, President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top-ranking advisers agree, after some debate, to a two-phase bombing plan for North Vietnam

1969, the U.S. government held its first draft lottery since World War II

1990, shortly after 11 a.m. on December 1, 1990, 132 feet below the English Channel, workers drill an opening the size of a car through a wall of rock. This was no ordinary hole --- it connected the two ends of an underwater tunnel linking Great Britain with the European mainland for the first time in more than 8,000 years

2000, Vicente Fox was sworn in as president of Mexico, ending 71 years of ruling-party domination

2001, two suicide bombers, practitioners of that "religion of peace", blew themselves up in back-to-back explosions at a downtown Jerusalem pedestrian mall, killing 11 innocent bystanders