August 12th
1121 Battle of Didgori: Georgian army under King David the Builder wins a decisive victory over the renowned Seljuk commander Ilghazi
1480 Ottoman troops conquer Otranto in southern Italy after a 15-day siege, killing 12,000, enslaving 5,000, and beheading 800 Christians for refusing to convert to Islam
1851 American inventor Isaac Singer patents his famous sewing machine
1883 The last quagga (a zebra subspecies with fewer stripes) dies at Artis Magistra Zoo in Amsterdam
1927 Silent film "Wings," starring Clara Bow and directed by William A. Wellman, premieres in NY as the first film and one of only two silent films to win an Academy Award for Best Picture
1964 Mickey Mantle switch-hits a home run for the record 10th and final time in a game, with one going 502 feet
1981 Don Estridge unveils the company's first personal computer, the IBM PC, at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, priced at $1,565 with 16 kilobytes of RAM, helping bring computing to the masses
1991 Heavy metal band Metallica releases its fifth album, "Metallica," which debuts at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart
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