The Times On This Day: Facts and trivia for every day of the year

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1809 Charles Darwin, naturalist, was born in Shrewsbury.

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1809 Abraham Lincoln, 16th president of the US, was born in Hodgenville, Kentucky.

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1818 Chile proclaimed its independence from Spain.

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1912 Hsuan-t’ung (Pu-Yi), the last emperor of China, was forced to abdicate.

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1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first US president to deliver a political speech on radio.

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1986 the Channel Tunnel treaty was signed between United Kingdom and France.

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2001 NEAR Shoemaker touched down on 433 Eros, becoming the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid.

13 FEBRUARY

1542 Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, was executed for adultery.

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1601 John Lancaster led the first East India Company voyage from London.

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1689 William III and Mary II acceded to the throne of England.

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1692 the MacDonalds were massacred by the Campbells at Glencoe.

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1917 the spy Mata Hari was arrested by the French.

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1945 Dresden was devastated when RAF bombers attacked the city.

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1959 the Barbie doll went on sale.

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1960 France exploded its first atomic bomb.

14 FEBRUARY

1477 John Paston received the first recorded valentine letter in English, from Margery Brews.

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1838 Margaret Knight, inventor of the square-bottom paper bag, was born in York, Maine.

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1852 the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, fitted with ten beds, admitted its first patient, George Parr, who was suffering from catarrh and diarrhoea.

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1895 Oscar Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened in London.

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1922 Marconi began regular broadcasting transmissions from Writtle in Essex.

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1939 the German battleship Bismarck was launched at Hamburg.

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2005 three PayPal workers started a video-sharing website, calling it YouTube.

15 FEBRUARY

1882 the first cargo of frozen meat left New Zealand for Britain on the SS Dunedin.

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1942 Singapore surrendered to Japanese forces.

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1944 the Allies bombed Monte Cassino monastery in Italy to prevent the Germans fortifying it.

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1965 Canada flew its newly adopted red maple leaf flag for the first time.

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1965 Nat King Cole, singer and jazz pianist who sold more than 50 million records, died of cancer aged 45.

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1971 Britain adopted decimal currency.

16 FEBRUARY

1659 the first known British cheque (for £400) was written by Nicholas Vanacker.

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1824 the first meeting of the Athenaeum Club — for “Literary and Scientific men and followers of the Fine Arts” — took place in London.

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1923 the archaeologist Howard Carter entered the sealed burial chamber of Tutankhamun in Thebes, Egypt. (The ruins of Thebes are found within the modern city of Luxor.)

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1959 Fidel Castro became prime minister of Cuba, and would govern until 2008.

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1960 the US nuclear submarine Triton set off on the first underwater round-the-world voyage.

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1998 the Angel of the North, a sculpture by Antony Gormley, was unveiled in Gateshead.

17 FEBRUARY

1600 the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome for heresies including maintaining that Earth was not the only inhabited planet.

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1818 German inventor Baron Karl von Drais de Sauerbrun patented the draisine, forerunner of the bicycle.

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1864 AB (Banjo) Paterson, poet (Waltzing Matilda), was born in Orange, New South Wales.

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1880 Tsar Alexander II of Russia survived an assassination attempt when a bomb exploded at the Winter Palace, St Petersburg.

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1909 Geronimo, Apache leader, died in captivity aged 79.

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1972 the House of Commons voted to join the European Common Market.

18 FEBRUARY

1478 George, Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV and Richard III, was said to have been drowned in a butt of malmsey at the Tower of London.

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1678 John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress was published, much of it having been composed while he was in prison for illegal preaching.

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1929 the winners of the first Academy Awards (known as Oscars from 1931) were announced, with the presentation being held later that year. (See 16 May.)

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1930 Pluto was discovered by the American astronomer Clyde W Tombaugh.

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1979 snow fell in the Sahara Desert.

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2005 a law banning hunting with dogs came into force in England and Wales.

19 FEBRUARY

1473 Nicolaus Copernicus, astronomer who proposed that the sun not the Earth was the centre of the Universe, was born in Poland.

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1861 Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in Russia.

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1878 the patent for Thomas Edison’s phonograph (the original gramophone) was issued.

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1897 the Women’s Institute was founded by Adelaide Hoodless in Ontario, Canada, and came to Britain during the First World War.

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1945 US marines landed on the island of Iwo Jima, whose capture created a forward air base in the war against Japan.

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1985 the BBC televised the first episode of EastEnders.

20 FEBRUARY

1632 Thomas Osborne (1st Duke of Leeds), statesman and leader of the Tories who was imprisoned twice on charges of bribery, was born.

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1811 Austria declared itself bankrupt because of the cost of fighting Napoleon.

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1816 the opening night of Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville was a fiasco, with one performer singing an aria with a bleeding nose after tripping on a trapdoor, and a cat attacking another during the finale to the first act.

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1947 Viscount Mountbatten of Burma was appointed last viceroy of India.

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1962 John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.

21 FEBRUARY

1741 Jethro Tull, inventor of the more efficient horse-drawn seed-drill, died at Hungerford, Berks.

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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.

22 FEBRUARY

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.

23 FEBRUARY

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.

24 FEBRUARY

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.

25 FEBRUARY

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.

26 FEBRUARY

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.

27 FEBRUARY

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.

28 FEBRUARY

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.

29 FEBRUARY

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.

1 MARCH

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.

2 MARCH

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.

3 MARCH

1875 the first performance of Carmen at Paris’s Opéra-Comique was so poorly received that it was thought to have hastened the death of its composer, Georges Bizet.

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1894 six months after his second Home Rule Bill had been defeated by the House of Lords, William Gladstone resigned as prime minister.

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1924 Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the caliphate (the Islamic leadership of the Ottoman sultans).

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1931 the US Congress adopted The Star-Spangled Banner as the American national anthem.

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1991 Rodney King was filmed being beaten by Los Angeles police officers, leading to widespread riots.

4 MARCH

1461 King Henry VI was deposed by his cousin Edward, Duke of York (who became King Edward IV).

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1789 the Congress of the United States held its first meeting in New York.

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1824 the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was founded (from 1854, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution).

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1890 the last of eight million rivets holding together 55,000 tons of steel was driven home at the opening ceremony of the Forth Bridge.

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