December 17

The Persian poet and mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi died in Konya; the day is still marked yearly as Seb-i Arus, his 'wedding night' of union.

Eknath Easwaran, teacher of passage meditation and translator of the Bhagavad Gītā and the Upaniṣads for Western readers, was born in Kerala.

Thubten Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama, remembered for his early-modern reforms in Tibet, died in Lhasa on this day in 1933.

Muhammad Hamidullah, a polyglot historian of early Islam who produced the first French Qur'an translation by a Muslim, died in Florida.

Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first sustained, controlled flight of a powered heavier-than-air aircraft, the opening flight lasting twelve seconds.