British inventor Richard Trevithick takes seven of his friends for a test ride on his “Puffing Devil,” or “Puffer,” the first steam-powered passenger vehicle, on December 24, 1801. Unlike the steam engine pioneered by the Scotsman James Watt, Trevithick’s used “strong steam”—that is, steam at a very high pressure (145 pounds per square inch, or psi). Trevithick’s engines were extremely versatile: They could be put to work in mines, on farms, in factories, on ships and in locomotives of all kinds.

A devastating fire at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., destroys about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including most of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library, sold to the institution in 1815.

On Christmas Eve 1948, a family of three moves into a home in Dover, Massachusetts with unusually large windows—the world’s first fully solar house, an idea decades ahead of its time. Nobody had ever tried living in a residence heated only by the sun, much less through a frigid New England winter.

The McCarran-Walter Act takes effect and revises U.S. immigration laws. The law was hailed by supporters as a necessary step in preventing alleged communist subversion in the United States, while opponents decried the legislation as being xenophobic and discriminatory.

On December 24, 1973, Stephenie Meyer, author of the “Twilight” novels, a vampire romance series for young adults that became a literary phenomenon, is born in Hartford, Connecticut.