336 The Christian church in Rome observed the Feast of the Nativity coinciding approximately with the winter solstice and the Roman Festival of Saturnalia.
880 The Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome. This was the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, which was not Holy nor Roman nor an Empire per Voltaire. Sounds like something from Faux News. Even so it lasted until 1806.
1741 Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius introduced the Centigrade temperature scale calibrated with a value of 100° for the freezing point of water and 0° for the boiling point. It was reversed by Carl Linnaeus in 1745 after Celsius’s death to facilitate more practical measurement. It was called the Swedish thermometer but Celsius referred to it as Centigrade. With his death Linnaeus named it Celsius himself.
1818 ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’ (‘Silent Night’) was first performed at the Church of St Nikolaus in Oberndorff bei Salzburg in Austria. The music was by local school teacher Franz Gruber and the lyrics by local priest Jospeh Mohr.
1990 The first successful communication between an HTTP client and server over the Internet spawned the World Wide Web.
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