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

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1862 Nathaniel Gordon became the only American to be executed for slave trading, their shipping being illegal under the 1820 Piracy Act.

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1916 the ten-month-long Battle of Verdun began with nine hours of the heaviest artillery bombardment ever witnessed.

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1964 24,000 rolls of Beatles wallpaper were flown to America.

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1965 Malcolm X was assassinated in New York aged 39 by three members of the Nation of Islam.

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1972 President Nixon began his historic visit of rapprochement to China.

1878 Frank Woolworth opened his first store in Utica, New York.

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1897 Blondin (Jean-François Gravelet), acrobat and tightrope walker known for his crossing of Niagara Falls, died at Ealing, London, aged 72.

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1907 taxi cabs with meters were introduced in London.

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1928 Bert Hinkler completed the first solo flight from England to Australia, landing in Darwin having taken off from Croydon 15 days earlier.

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1946 Dr Selman Abraham Waksman announced his discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin.

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2006 £53 million was discovered to have been stolen from a Securitas depot in Kent, in Britain’s biggest robbery.

1633 Samuel Pepys, diarist, was born in London.

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1820 the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the entire British cabinet, was uncovered.

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1821 John Keats, poet, died in Rome of tuberculosis aged 25.

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1874 Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented his new game of lawn tennis.

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1889 Victor Fleming, director whose films included Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939), was born in California.

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1905 the world’s first Rotary Club was founded in Chicago.

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1997 it was announced that Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep, had been born.

1582 Pope Gregory XIII published a papal bull that established a new-style (Gregorian) calendar, but it took England almost 200 years to follow suit.

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1848 the last king of France, Louis-Philippe, who had reigned since 1830, was forced to abdicate by revolutionaries who then proclaimed the Second Republic.

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1920 US-born MP Nancy Astor became the first woman to speak in the House of Commons.

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1923 the Flying Scotsman entered service with the London and North Eastern Railway.

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2001 Claude Shannon, mathematician whose work on modern information theory laid the basis for the information age, died.

1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I.

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1836 Samuel Colt was granted a patent for his revolver.

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1862 a paper currency known as Greenbacks was introduced in the US by order of President Abraham Lincoln.

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1868 Andrew Johnson, 17th American president, was impeached, to be acquitted the following May by a single vote.

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1952 the Windscale plutonium plant at Sellafield began operation.

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1964 floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) won the world heavyweight boxing championship when Sonny Liston failed to come out for the seventh round.

1797 the Bank of England issued £1 banknotes for the first time.

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1815 Napoleon escaped from exile in Elba.

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1848 The Communist Manifesto was published, having been printed in London.

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1924 Adolf Hitler appeared in court, charged with treason for leading the failed coup d’état known as the beer-hall putsch.

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1935 a Heyford bomber flying in the main beam of a BBC short-wave transmitter gave back reflected signals to the ground, winning Robert Watson-Watt government approval to develop radar technology.

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1936 Hitler opened the first factory to manufacture the Volkswagen, the people’s car.

c. 272 Constantine the Great, Roman emperor 306–337, was born in modern Nis, Serbia.

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1814 Beethoven’s 8th Symphony received its premiere in Vienna.

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1879 at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, Constantin Fahlberg and Ira Remsen accidentally discovered saccharin.

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1900 a meeting of trade unionists, Marxists and Fabians resulted in the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee, or British Labour Party.

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1902 John Steinbeck, novelist, was born in Salinas, California.

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1933 arson destroyed part of Germany’s Reichstag building, leading to the suspension of civil liberties.

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1939 General Franco’s rebel Nationalist Government was recognised by Britain and France.

1533 Michel de Montaigne, philosopher who popularised the essay form, was born.

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1900 after a four-month siege during the Boer War, the 20,000-strong British garrison in Ladysmith was relieved.

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1922 Lord Allenby, high commissioner in Egypt, announced the termination of the British protectorate and the inception of Egyptian independence.

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1956 Jay Forrester patented random-access coincident-current magnetic storage, which would become the standard memory device for computers.

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1975 a London Underground train crashed at Moorgate station, killing 35 people.

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1986 the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated while walking home in Stockholm, a crime that remains unsolved.

1868 Conservative Party leader Benjamin Disraeli formed his first government.

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1880 the 9.3-mile St Gotthard railway tunnel, then the longest in the world, was completed, linking Switzerland and Italy.

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1940 Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actress to win an Oscar, for Gone With the Wind .

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1956 Pakistan became an Islamic republic.

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1960 thousands of people were killed in an earthquake in Agadir, Morocco.

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1960 Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago.

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1984 Pierre Trudeau resigned after 15 years as premier of Canada.

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1996 the siege of Sarajevo ended after almost seven years.

1360 during the siege of Rheims, King Edward III contributed £16 towards the ransom of Geoffrey Chaucer, then serving as a soldier.

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1872 US president Ulysses S Grant established America’s first national park, Yellowstone.

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1912 George Grossmith, co-author of The Diary of a Nobody and the comic lead in Gilbert and Sullivan’s early productions, died.

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1932 Charles Augustus, the 20-month-old son of the American aviator Charles Lindbergh, was abducted from his nursery and later found dead.

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1966 the unmanned Soviet probe Venera 3 impacted on Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet.

1882 Queen Victoria narrowly escaped assassination by Roderick Maclean as she sat in her railway carriage at Windsor station, this being the eighth attempt made on her life since the start of her reign.

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1949 Captain James Gallagher and his US air force crew completed the first round-the-world non-stop flight (23,452 miles in 94 hours and 1 minute).

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1956 Morocco declared its political independence from France.

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1958 the British Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Dr Vivian Fuchs, completed the first surface crossing of Antarctica.

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1970 Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister, declared his country an independent republic.