In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.
 
Under what seemed to be a local dust cloud, the day grew darker and darker.—John Hersey, “Hiroshima,” The New Yorker, August 31, 1946

The United States Of America became the first—and to this date, the only—nation to use a nuclear weapon against an enemy nation in war on this date in 1945. The Enola Gay, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber, flew a mission over Japan and dropped a bomb code-named “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima.

Hiroshima was selected as a target in part because Tokyo was already “rubble” after a long bombing campaign. Kyoto was also favored. Hiroshima, unlike Kyoto, had a large military district.
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The first traffic light was installed in London in December 1868 outside Parliament. It used wooden arms to indicate stop and go during the day and gas lights (red and green) for nighttime use. It was manually operated, and it only lasted a month as the rig exploded in January 1869 and killed the police officer who was operating it that day.

A police officer in Salt Lake City, Utah, is credited with inventing the electric traffic light in 1912, but no traffic control system—no electric traffic control system—was installed until August 5, 1914, one hundred and two years ago today, at the busy intersection of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.
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Some achievements in sports are noteworthy for being firsts or lasts or mosts, and other achievements are more trivial, are simply items in the news that make people remember something about any given August 4, or perhaps the August 4 that took place in 1982.

Among fans of the New York Mets, Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies, and Montreal Expos, the date August 4, 1982, and the name Joel Youngblood will forever be linked. He awoke that day an outfielder for the Mets and went to bed that night an Expo. Now, many baseball players have been traded mid-season; it is happening right now. Youngblood got a hit for two different teams in two different games in two different cities in one day, however, and he remains the only player to have ever accomplished this.
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