December 28 in History

On 28 December 1895, in the basement Salon Indien du Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, Auguste and Louis Lumière screened a program of short films to a paying audience. The date is traditionally treated as the birth of commercial cinema. Moving pictures had been shown before, but this was a landmark in presenting projected film to a ticket-buying public as a form of entertainment, and the brothers' system proved practical enough to spread across the world within a couple of years.

On the morning of 28 December 1908, a powerful earthquake struck the Strait of Messina, the narrow channel separating Sicily from the Italian mainland. Followed within minutes by a tsunami, it destroyed the Sicilian city of Messina and the Calabrian city of Reggio and damaged many surrounding towns. Estimates of the dead vary widely, but the figure of around 75,000 is commonly cited, and some historians suggest it may have been considerably higher. It remains the deadliest earthquake in modern European history.