Today in History: September 27

1696: St. Alphonsus Liguori, who will earn his Doctorate of Laws at 16 and by age 27 will be one of the leaders of the Neapolitan bar, is born at Marianella, near Naples.  He’ll renounce his legal career when he finds that he has inadvertently been led to make a false argument to a court.

1825: The 26-mile Stockton & Darlington Railway, the first to use steam engines to haul passengers, opens for business, carrying 600 passengers in a single train.

1941: The first of steelmaker Henry Kaiser’s remarkable 7,000-ton Liberty Ship freighters, the S.S. Patrick Henry, is christened.  Before war’s end the prefab ships will be completed at the rate of three a day.

1954: Steve Allen hosts the first installment of what will become The Tonight Show on NBC Television.

1983:  Richard Stallman announces the start of the GNU free software project.  He’ll later become the principal author of the GNU General Public License, which will become the most popular license agreement for free software.

1995: The U.S. Government releases the first of its new $100 bill design, featuring the off-center Benjamin Franklin.

2004: The Virgin Group and Mojave Aerospace Ventures announce a joint project (“Virgin Galactic”) to develop commercial space flight with what they will call the “VSS Enterprise.”