Sir Francis Drake completed a nearly three-year voyage around the world, arriving back in Plymouth, England aboard the Golden Hind. He was only the second commander to circumnavigate the globe, after Magellan's expedition, and returned with plundered Spanish silver and gold worth a fortune, prompting Queen Elizabeth I to knight him aboard his own ship.

At the Kärntnertor Theatre in Vienna, Ludwig van Beethoven presented his Symphony No. 9 for the first time, featuring the choral 'Ode to Joy' finale — a radical innovation that put human voices into a symphony. Beethoven, almost completely deaf by then, stood on stage helping conduct, and had to be turned around by a singer to see the audience's wild applause he could not hear.

U-20 fired a single torpedo into the Cunard liner Lusitania as it sailed from New York to Liverpool, and a second internal explosion sent the ship under in eighteen minutes. Among the 1,198 dead were 128 Americans. Germany had warned travelers of the risk in newspaper ads, but the sinking became a rallying point for U.S. entry into World War I two years later.

At Allied headquarters in Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signed the instrument of unconditional surrender on behalf of the German High Command, agreeing to end all military operations at 11:01 p.m. the following day. The signing came after Hitler's suicide a week earlier and the collapse of German resistance on all fronts, formally closing nearly six years of war in Europe.

After nearly two months of trench warfare and artillery bombardment across the mountains of northwestern Vietnam, General Vo Nguyen Giap's Viet Minh forces overwhelmed the last French positions at Dien Bien Phu. Some 11,000 French and colonial troops surrendered. The defeat shattered French confidence in the war and led directly to the Geneva Accords partitioning Vietnam, setting the stage for later American involvement.

NASA's newest orbiter, Endeavour, built to replace the lost Challenger, lifted off from Kennedy Space Center on its first mission. The crew's primary goal was to capture the stranded Intelsat VI satellite, attach a new rocket motor, and send it back into proper orbit — requiring the first three-person spacewalk in spaceflight history after two earlier capture attempts failed.