Events

• July 30 - Baltimore, Maryland is founded.
• First printing press was established in Ottoman Empire (app. 300 years after it was first used in western civilization) by Ibrahim Muteferrika.
• Astronomer James Bradley discovers and describes the prinicple of aberration of starlight .

Births

• January 12 - Edmund Burke, statesman, philosopher (d. 1797)
• January 22 - Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, author and philosopher (d. 1781)
• May 2 - Catherine the Great of Russia (d. 1796)

Deaths

• January 19 - William Congreve, English playwright
• May 17 - Samuel Clarke, English philosopher
• August 5 - Thomas Newcomen, English inventor of an early steam engine (born 1663)