James Owen - The Times On This Day - Facts and trivia for every day of the year

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1897 Dennis Wheatley, historical novelist and thriller writer ( The Devil Rides Out ), was born.

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1935 Elvis Presley, singer, was born in Tupelo, Mississippi.

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1940 wartime rationing of butter, bacon and sugar began in the UK.

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1959 Charles de Gaulle was proclaimed president of the French Republic.

1799 income tax was introduced by prime minister William Pitt the Younger to raise funds for the Napoleonic Wars.

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1806 Horatio Nelson was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral.

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1816 Sir Humphry Davy’s safety lamp was first used in a mine.

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1873 Napoleon III, French Emperor, died in exile in England.

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1913 Richard Nixon, president of the United States 1969–74, was born in Yorba Linda, California.

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1960 work began on the Aswan High Dam in Egypt and would take ten years to complete.

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1972 the liner Queen Elizabeth was destroyed by fire in Hong Kong harbour.

1840 the Penny Post was introduced.

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1862 Samuel Colt, firearms manufacturer, died as one of America’s wealthiest men.

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1863 the Metropolitan Railway — ancestor of the London Underground — opened between Paddington and Farringdon Street.

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1870 the Standard Oil Company, which was to be vastly enriched by the advent of the motor car, founded by William and John D Rockefeller.

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1917 William Cody (Buffalo Bill), US army scout, and later showman who killed 4,280 buffalo in eight months to feed railroad workers, died.

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1946 the inaugural session of the UN general assembly opened in London.

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1985 Clive Sinclair launched the C5 electric car at £399.

1753 Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection was the foundation of the British Museum, died at Chelsea.

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1891 Georges Haussmann, architect who planned much of modern Paris, died.

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1922 insulin first used successfully in the treatment of diabetes.

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1928 Thomas Hardy, author of Tess of the d’Urbervilles , died at Dorchester, Dorset.

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1946 King Zog of Albania was dethroned.

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1969 Richmal Crompton, author of Just William , died.

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1973 the Open University awarded its first degrees.

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1981 a three-man British team, led by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, completed the longest and fastest crossing of Antarctica after 75 days and 2,500 miles.

1628 Charles Perrault, author of fairytales ( Cinderella , The Sleeping Beauty ), was born in Paris.

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1856 John Singer Sargent, portrait painter, was born in Florence.

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1879 the British declared war on the Zulu leader Cetewayo.

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1948 the London Co-op opened the first supermarket in the capital at Manor Park.

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1950 64 submariners and dockyard workers were killed when the tanker Divina struck Truculent on the Thames.

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1970 a Boeing 747 landed at Heathrow after its first flight from New York.

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1976 Agatha Christie, crime novelist, died aged 85.

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2010 316,000 people died in an earthquake in Haiti.

1893 the Independent Labour Party formed by Keir Hardie to promote working-class representation.

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1906 Aleksandr Popov, who used radio waves to transmit a message in 1896, independently of Guglielmo Marconi, died in St Petersburg.

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1929 Wyatt Earp, gambler and law officer involved in the gunfight at the OK Corral in 1881, died.

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1941 James Joyce, novelist, died in Zurich aged 58.

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1978 Nasa selected its first women astronauts.

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1989 the Friday the 13th virus struck at IBM-compatible computers.

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2004 Harold Shipman, who killed more than 250 people, hanged himself in prison.

1874 Johann Philipp Reis, whose telephone was not a commercial success, died.

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1878 the first demonstration of Alexander Graham Bell’s newly invented telephone given to Queen Victoria on the Isle of Wight.

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1898 Rev Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , died.

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1957 Humphrey Bogart, actor ( Casablanca ), died of cancer aged 57.

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1977 Anthony Eden, prime minister 1955–57, died.

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1983 Metropolitan Police officers shot and gravely injured film editor Stephen Waldorf, mistakenly believing him to be an escaped convict.

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1989 Muslims in Bradford ritually burnt a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

1559 Elizabeth I crowned Queen of England.

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1759 the British Museum opened at Montague House, London.

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1815 Emma, Lady Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson, died in poverty at Calais.

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1867 40 skaters drowned when the ice broke on Regent’s Park lake, London.

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1970 the Nigeria-Biafra war concluded with Biafra’s surrender after the deaths of more than one million people.

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1973 President Nixon halted US bombing in North Vietnam after peace talks in Paris.

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2001 the Wikipedia website went online.

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2009 US Airways Flight 1549 safely crash-landed in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey.

1604 the Hampton Court Conference ended, in which King James I authorised a new translation of the Bible.

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1920 prohibition of the sale of alcohol began in America.

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1944 General Dwight D Eisenhower arrived in England as supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe.

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1969 21-year-old student Jan Palach set fire to himself in Prague in protest at the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

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1970 Colonel Muammar Gaddafi became the leader of Libya, following a coup against King Idris.

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1979 the Shah of Iran was forced into exile in Egypt.

1773 Captain Cook’s Resolution crossed the Antarctic Circle, the first ship to do so.

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1874 conjoined Thai-American brothers Chang and Eng Bunker, regarded as the original Siamese twins, died within two hours of one another, aged 62, in North Carolina.

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1912 Captain Robert Scott reached the South Pole, to discover his rival Roald Amundsen had reached it first.

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1983 the BBC introduced breakfast television.

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1991 allied forces launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraqi positions following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

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1995 more than 6,400 people were killed when an earthquake struck Kobe, Japan.

1778 Captain Cook sighted the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii).

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1813 Joseph Farwell Glidden, farmer who patented the first commercially viable barbed wire, born in New Hampshire.

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1871 William of Prussia was proclaimed the first German Emperor.

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1882 AA Milne, children’s writer, was born.

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1884 Arthur Ransome, children’s writer, was born.

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1911 piloted by Lt Eugene B Ely, the first aircraft to land on a ship touched down on the cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco harbour.

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1919 the Versailles Peace Conference opened.

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1989 Bruce Chatwin, travel writer ( In Patagonia ) and novelist, died in Nice aged 48.

1736 James Watt, designer of the steam engine that largely powered the Industrial Revolution, was born in Greenock, Renfrewshire.