On this day in history

Tribune staff report

April 23, 2008

On April 23, 1564, William Shakespeare is believed to have been born; he died 52 years later—on April 23.

In 1858 physicist Max Planck, who developed the quantum theory, was born in Kiel, Germany.

In 1954 Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves hit the first of his record 755 major-league home runs.

In 1968 the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church merged as the United Methodist Church.

In 1985 Coca-Cola announced it was changing the secret formula for Coke. (An angry public forced Coke to resume selling the original version).

In 1988 a federal ban on smoking during domestic airline flights of two hours or less went into effect.

In 1992 McDonald's opened its first fast-food restaurant in Beijing.

In 1995 sportscaster Howard Cosell died at 77 in New York.

In 1996 a Bronx jury ordered Bernhard Goetz to pay $43 million to Darrell Cabey, one of four threatening young men he'd shot on a subway car in 1984.

In 1997 doctors at the University of Southern California announced that a child was born in late 1996 to a 63-year-old woman on hormone therapy.

In 1998 James Earl Ray, who had confessed to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and then claimed he was framed, died at 70 in Nashville.

In 2004 President Bush eased Reagan-era sanctions against Libya in return for Moammar Gadhafi's pledge to give up his nation's program for weapons of mass destruction.