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Today in History, January 9th

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. Plus the start of Joan of Arc's trial and Mississippi's 1861 secession.

By Today in History Updated November 10, 2026 3 min read Sources checked

Published January 9, 2026 · Last updated November 10, 2026

January 9 is best known as the day Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, putting a phone, an iPod and an internet device into one touchscreen gadget. The date also saw Joan of Arc’s trial begin in 1431 and Mississippi leave the Union in 1861.

The big story: Steve Jobs Unveils the iPhone (2007)

At the Macworld convention in San Francisco on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onstage and introduced what he framed as three products: a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone and an internet device. Then he revealed that they were all the same thing. The iPhone had almost no buttons. You worked it with your fingers on a multi-touch screen, it came with a real web browser and Google Maps, and it had a 2-megapixel camera. The price was steep for a phone, $499 for 4GB and $599 for 8GB, and it would not ship until June, only through Cingular in the U.S. People lined up anyway. More than 1.4 million sold by November, and Time named it the invention of the year. The bigger change came in 2008, when Apple opened the App Store and the phone became a pocket computer that anyone could write software for. Most of us have been staring down at one ever since.

More events on January 9

Year	What happened
1431	Joan of Arc’s trial began in France. She faced more than 70 charges and was burned at the stake about five months later.
1861	Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union. The same day, South Carolina batteries fired on the Star of the West, a ship trying to resupply Fort Sumter.
1916	Allied troops completed their withdrawal from Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula, ending a campaign that cost the Allies about 250,000 casualties.
1945	General Douglas MacArthur’s U.S. 6th Army landed at Lingayen Gulf, beginning the invasion of Luzon in the Philippines.
1952	In his State of the Union address, President Harry Truman warned that Americans were living through a perilous Cold War moment.
1960	Construction began on Egypt’s Aswan High Dam on the Nile.
1972	The Milwaukee Bucks beat the Los Angeles Lakers 120-104, ending the Lakers’ record 33-game winning streak.
1972	The former ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth, renamed Seawise University, caught fire in Hong Kong harbor and later sank.
2001	Apple introduced iTunes, its software for playing and organizing digital music.
2005	Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority.

Born on January 9

1859: Carrie Chapman Catt, suffrage leader who helped win the 19th Amendment.
1908: Simone de Beauvoir, French writer and philosopher, author of The Second Sex.
1913: Richard Nixon, 37th U.S. president and the first to resign the office.
1941: Joan Baez, folk singer and activist.