This Day in History

[GordMay]

60 Years ago:

1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin becomes first man in space, orbits the Earth, in “Vostok 1". The first human spaceflight took 108 minutes, from launch to landing.

“I looked around and saw something orange and beautiful. I didn’t know what it was. It was coming towards us. Granny was frightened — she grabbed my hand.”
While planting potatoes with her grandmother, a five-year-old girl witnessed Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s return to Earth. Sixty years later, she remembers the experience.
Video ➥ https://www.bbc.com/news/av/science-...nment-56690949

[GordMay]

April 13


1250: The Seventh Crusade is defeated in Egypt, Louis IX of France captured.

1743: Thomas Jefferson, 3rd President of United States, born in Shadwell, Virginia.

1834: HMS “Beagle” anchors at river mouth of Rio Santa Cruz, Patagonia.

1861: After 34 hours of bombardment, Union-held ‘Fort Sumter’ surrenders to Confederates.

1869: Steam power brake patented, by George Westinghouse.

1904: A squadron of the Russian fleet is decoyed out of Port Arthur, by Japanese maneuvers. When they realize they are sailing into a trap; their battleship Petropavlovsk hits a mine and sinks, with a loss of 700 men.

1906: Mutiny on Portuguese battleships “Dom Carlos” & “Vasco da Gama”.

1919: British forces kill hundreds [350 - 400?] of unarmed Indian nationalists, in the Amritsar Massacre. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer ordered his men to shoot into the crowd, in his own words “to punish the Indians for disobedience.”

1928: 1st trans-Atlantic flight Europe to US, by Fitzmaurice-von Hunefeld-Köhl.

1949: Philip S. Hench, at Mayo Clinic, announces discovery of cortisone to treat rheumatoid arthritis.

1960: The first navigational satellite, "Transit 1B", is launched into Earth's orbit. Primarily used, by the U.S. Navy, to update the navigation systems aboard their ‘Polaris’ submarines.

1970: An oxygen tank explodes on “Apollo 13", preventing a planned moon landing, and jeopardizing the lives of the three-man crew.
"Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here" ~ Jack Swigert

1994: Asteroid “7373 Takei” discovered, and named after Star Trek actor George Takei.

2013: China's capital city Beijing reported its first case of the ‘H7N9' bird flu, that had been spreading throughout the country. The case was reported with a seven year old girl, who had been infected with the flu. Thus far the UN had recorded a total of twenty-eight cases, and a total of nine deaths, from this flu in China.

2015: Migrant ship, carrying around 550, sinks off the Libyan coast, about 400 drown.
List of migrant vessel incidents on the Mediterranean Sea [2007 - 2016] ➥ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...iterranean_Sea

[GordMay]

April 14

43 BC: Battle of Forum Gallorum: Mark Antony, besieging Julius Caesar's assassin, Decimus Junius Brutus, in Mutina, defeats the forces of the consul Pansa, who is killed. The civil war, led to the eventual assumption to power of Augustus, who became the first Roman Emperor.

1611: Word "telescope" is 1st used, by Prince Federico Cesi.

1629: Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist, Christiaan Huygens born.

1792: France declares war on Austria, starting French Revolutionary Wars.

1828: Noah Webster published ‘An American Dictionary of the English Language’; based on the principle that word usage should evolve from the spoken language.

1865: President Abraham Lincoln is shot in the head, in Ford's Theater, by John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln dies a day later.

1894: Thomas Edison's kinetoscope [moving pictures] is shown to the public, for the first time.

1900: The World Exposition opens in Paris.

1903: Dr Harry Plotz discovers a vaccine against typhoid.

1912: The passenger liner RMS “Titanic”, deemed unsinkable, strikes an iceberg, on her maiden voyage, and begins to sink. The ship will go under the next day, with a loss of over 1,500 lives.

1924: The Italian Airship “Number 1" was torn away from its moorings in strong winds, and 3 crewmen were carried 200 ft., and hurled to their deaths.

1940: RCA demonstrated its new electron microscope, in Philadelphia.

1944: Freighter "Fort Stikene" explodes in Bombay, India, killing 1,376.

1956: Ampex Corp demonstrates 1st commercial videotape recorder, ‘VR-1000'.

1964: Rachel Carson, American biologist, author of "Silent Spring" [1962], dies.

1980: 1st Cubans of the ‘Mariel boatlift’ sail to Florida.

1986: Desmond Tutu elected Anglican Archbishop of Capetown.
1986: Double-decker ferry sinks, in stormy weather, in Bangladesh, killing 200.
1986: The heaviest hailstones ever recorded hit Bangladesh. The lumps of ice weighed about 1 kg (2.2 lb). A total of 92 people reportedly died, as a result.

1989: 1,100,000,000th Chinese born.

1992: Court throws out Apple's lawsuit against Microsoft.

1999: A severe hailstorm strikes Sydney, Australia, causing A$1.7 billion in insured damages, the most costly natural disaster in Australian history.

2003: The ‘Human Genome Project’ is completed, with 99% of the human genome sequenced, to an accuracy of 99.99%. The project was started in October, 1990.

2010: Icelandic Volcano ‘Eyjafjallajökull’ begins erupting from the top crater, in the centre of the glacier, disrupting air traffic for days, across northern and central Europe.

2014: The Islamic sectarian movement, 'Boko Haram', kidnapped more than 275 girls from a boarding school, in Chibok, Nigeria.

2015: Archaeologists announce they have found 3.3 million-year old stone tools, at Lomekwi in Kenya, the oldest ever discovered, and which pre-date the earliest humans.

2019: Seychelles President, Danny Faure, makes first-ever live speech from a submersible, pleading for better marine protection.

[GordMay]

April 15

1250: Kublai is acclaimed the Great Khan, by a Mongol Great Council.

1452: Italian artist, engineer, and scientist, Leonardo da Vinci, born in Vinci, Italy.

1755: English lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, publishes his Dictionary of the English Language.

1865: Abraham Lincoln dies from John Wilkes Booth's assassination bullet.

1892: General Electric Company formed, by merger of Thomas Edison's General Electric Company with Thomson-Houston Electric Company, arranged by J. P. Morgan, and incorporated in NY.

1912: With her band playing on the deck, the ocean liner RMS “Titanic” sinks, at 2:27 a.m., in the North Atlantic.

1923: Insulin becomes generally available, for people suffering with diabetes.

1935: The Eastman Kodak Company launches ‘Kodachrome’ film.

1945: The German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen is liberated. British and Canadian troops found about 53,000 prisoners inside the camp. Tens of thousands died before and after the liberation.
1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt is buried, on the grounds of his Hyde Park home.

1952: President Harry Truman signs the official Japanese peace treaty.
1952: The maiden flight of the B-52 ‘Stratofortress’ prototype.

1977: The first West Coast Computer Faire begins, introducing personal computers, in both kit and assembled form, to a new audience, the general public. It was an important year for personal computing, as three of the most popular personal computing systems of all time were announced then: the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Radio Shack TRS-80.

1980: French novelist and playwright, Jean-Paul Sartre, who was a leading exponent of existentialism, died.

1986: The United States launches “Operation El Dorado Canyon” air raids, against Libya, responding to ‘La Belle’ disco, Berlin bombing, in which 3 people died. Around 40 Libyans died in bombings. Colonel Muamar Gaddafi’s residential compound took a direct hit, that killed Hanna Gaddafi, the adopted baby daughter of the Libyan leader.

1989: Tragedy occurred, during FA semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, when a crush of football (soccer) fans resulted in
96 deaths, and hundreds [766?] of injuries; police mistakes were later blamed for the incident.
1989: A small group of students initiates pro-democracy protest on Tiananmen Square, in Beijing. The death of reformer Hu Yaobang triggered the demonstrations, which grew in size,
and were brutally dispersed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre, on June 4.

1998: Pol Pot, Cambodian politician, 29th Prime Minister of Cambodia, died. As leader of theKhmer Rouge government, from 1975 to 1979, an estimated 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians died of starvation, execution, disease or overwork.

2010: Volcanic ash, from the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, in Iceland, leads to the closure of airspace over most of Europe.

2013: Near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, two homemade bombs were detonated in the crowd of spectators; 3 people were killed and more than 260 were wounded in the terrorist attack.

2019: The historic cathedral ‘Notre-Dame de Paris’ caught fire. during a restoration campaign, and the blaze destroyed most of the cathedral's roof, the 19th-century spire, and some of the rib vaulting.
2019: Measles cases jump 300%, in first three months of 2019, according to World Health Organization, largest rise in Africa (700%), with 800 deaths in Madagascar.

2020: US's deadliest day during COVID-19 pandemic, with 2,752 deaths reported.

[GordMay]

April 16

0073: Masada, a Jewish fortress, on the edge of the Judean desert, between Ein Gedi and Sodom, falls to the Romans, after several months of siege, ending the Jewish [Sicarii/Zealot] Revolt.

1705: Queen Anne, of England, knights Isaac Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge.

1797: Spithead Mutiny begins: British Royal Navy sailors protest over living and working conditions and pay, near Portsmouth.

1818: U.S. Senate ratifies Rush-Bagot amendment (unarmed US-Canada border), a treaty between the United States and Great Britain, limiting naval armaments on the Great Lakes, and Lake Champlain, following the War of 1812. The treaty was confirmed by Canada, following Confederation in 1867.

1854: Steamer "Long Beach" sinks, off Long Beach, NY, 311 die.

1859: French historian, scientist, Alexis de Tocqueville died.

1912: American aviator, Harriet Quimby, became the first woman to fly across the English Channel, guiding her French Blériot monoplane through heavy overcast from Dover, England, to Hardelot, France.

1943: Swiss scientist, Dr. Albert Hofmann, discovers the psychedelic effects of ‘LSD’ [lysergic acid diethylamide], a drug he had first synthesized in 1938.

1945: World War II: Dutch town of Arnhem, site of failed ‘Operation Market Garden’, is freed by British and Canadian forces.

1948: In order to restore the economy of Europe, after World War II, 16 European countries formed the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (later the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

1953: British royal yacht “Britannia” launched by Queen Elizabeth II.

1956: 1st solar powered radios go on sale.

1959: "LISP" Language Unveiled. The programming language that provided the basis for work in artificial intelligence, LISP, was created by John McCarthy. ‘LISP’ offers programmers flexibility in organization, and it, or its descendants, are still used in the AI development environment.

1982: Queen Elizabeth proclaims Canada's new constitution.

1989: ‘Berendrechtsluis’ opens in Antwerp, biggest flood lock in world.

1992: The “Katina P” runs aground off of Maputo, Mozambique. 60,000 tons of crude oil spill into the ocean.

2004: The super liner “Queen Mary 2" embarks on her first Transatlantic crossing, linking the golden age of ocean travel to the modern age of ocean travel.

2014: South Korean ferry MV “Sewol” sinks on route Incheon to Jeju, 304 drown, mostly students. National controversy erupts over rescue efforts and actions of crew and owner.

2015: Elizabeth Holmes, American entrepreneur, inventor, and founder and CEO of ‘Theranos’, is named one of TIME's "100 Most Influential People" of 2015.
In June 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Holmes, and former Theranos chief operating officer Ramesh Balwani, on nine counts of wire fraud, and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for distributing blood tests with falsified results to consumers. A trial is set to begin on August 31, 2021, after being rescheduled four times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and her pregnancy due in July.

2020: A new study says the time has arrived: a megadrought, as bad or worse than anything from known prehistory, is very likely in progress, and warming climate is playing a key role. The study, based on modern weather observations, 1,200 years of tree-ring data, and dozens of climate models, appears this week in the leading journal Science.
“Climate-Driven Megadrought Is Emerging in Western U.S., Says Study”
➥ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2020/0...g-western-u-s/
2020: Nationwide State of Emergency declared in Japan till 6 May, due to the worsening COVID-19 outbreak.

[GordMay]

April 17

1492: Christopher Columbus signs a contract with Spain, to find a western route to the Indies, with the stated goal of converting people to Catholicism. This promises him 10% of all riches found, and the governorship of any lands encountered.

1524: Present-day New York Harbor is discovered, by a Florentine navigator, Giovanni da Verrazzano.

1790: Benjamin Franklin, American printer, publisher, author, inventor, scientist, and diplomat, 6th President of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost of the Founding Fathers, died.

1808: ‘Bayonne Decree’, by Napoleon Bonaparte of France, orders seizure of U.S. ships.

1932: Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie ends slavery.

1944: Harvard University President, James Conant, writes to IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr., to let him know that the ‘Harvard Mark I’, developed in cooperation between the two, was operating smoothly. The project was one of the many examples of wartime collaboration among the federal government, universities, and private corporations. In his letter, Conant noted that the ‘Mark I’ already was "being used for special problems, in connection with the war effort."

1945: U.S. 8th Air Force bombs Dresden.

1951: The crew of the British submarine "Affray" is feared dead, after going missing off the south coast of England. Two months later, the Affray was found in 300 ft of water 46 miles south of Portland.

1961: A group of ±1,400 CIA-backed Cuban exiles, invaded the ‘Bay of Pigs’, on the southern coast of Cuba, in an attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. The invasion failed miserably, and by April 21st all had been killed or captured. One year earlier the CIA had recommended to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Administration to recruit, support, equip and train Cuban exiles, for action against the new government of Fidel Castro. Following the change to the new U.S. President John F. Kennedy, in February, who was also advised the operation would be a success, the operation was continued.

1962: Around the world, the Oral Polio Vaccine, developed by Albert Sabin, schools, Health Clinics and Doctors were preparing to administer the new Polio Vaccine, to children who had not received the injected Salk vaccine . Polio had been increasing at an alarming rate, prior to the development of the Salk vaccine, and in 1952 alone over 58,000 cases of Polio occurred in the United States.

1969: Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

1982: The Canada Act, also known as the Constitution Act, took effect, establishing certain individual rights, preserving parliamentary supremacy, and making Canada a wholly independent, fully sovereign state.

1986: The world's longest war ends, without a single shot having been fired. The state of war between the Netherlands, and the Isles of Scilly, had been extended for a total of 335 years, by the lack of a peace treaty. Some historians doubt that war had ever been declared.

2019: 10 babies with "bubble boy disease" cured, using a gene therapy made from HIV, at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, according to new study.[1]
More about ➥ https://www.stjude.org/media-resourc...y-disease.html
[1] “Lentiviral Gene Therapy Combined with Low-Dose Busulfan in Infants with SCID-X1" ~ by Ewelina Mamcarz, M.D et al
➥ https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1815408

[GordMay]

April 18

1506: The cornerstone of the current St. Peter's Basilica is laid in the Vatican, by Pope Julius II.

1775: Paul Revere and William Dawes ride from Charlestown to Lexington, warning the "regulars are coming!".

1838: The Wilkes' expedition to the South Pole sets sail.

1906: San Francisco earthquake (8.25) and fire kills nearly 4,000, while destroying 75% of the city.

1912: Cunard liner RMS “Carpathia” brings 705 survivors from the RMS “Titanic”, to New York City.

1930: Nothing. BBC news announcer announces, "there is no news", at 20:45 news bulletin, plays music instead.

1934: Adolf Hitler names Joachim von Ribbentrop ambassador for disarmament.

1936: Pan-Am ‘Clipper’ begins regular passenger flights, from San Francisco to Honolulu.

1942: Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle [later Lt Gen] bombs Tokyo, & other Japanese cities. Sixteen ‘B-25B’ Mitchell medium bombers were launched, without fighter escort, from the U.S. Navy's aircraft carrier USS “Hornet”, deep in the Western Pacific Ocean, each with a crew of five men. Fifteen aircraft reached China, but all crashed, while the 16th landed at Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union. Of the 80 crew members, 77 survived the mission. Eight airmen were captured by Imperial Japanese Army troops, in Eastern China; three were later executed.

1943: ‘Operation Vengeance’: US Army Air Force ‘P-38G’ fighter aircraft , from Kukum Field on Guadalcanal, ambush and shoot down the transport bomber aircraft of Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and mastermind behind the Pearl Harbor attack.

1946: The League of Nations dissolves.

1948: International Court of Justice opens at The Hague, Netherlands.

1949: Republic of Ireland withdraws from British Commonwealth.

1955: German/American physicist, Albert Einstein, dies.

1963: Dr James Campbell performed the 1st human nerve transplant.

1978: U.S. Senate votes to turn Panama Canal over to Panama, on December 31, 1999.

1986: IBM produces 1st megabit-chip, a memory chip capable of storing 1 million bits of information, in a commercial product; its Model ‘3090'.

2002: Norwegian explorer, Thor Heyerdahl, dies.

2013: Two earth-like planets [Kepler-62f and Kepler-62e] are discovered, orbiting the star ‘Kepler-62'.

2020: French flagship aircraft carrier “Charles de Gaulle” reports over 1,000 cases of COVID-19, prompting an investigation.
2020: Canada's worst modern mass shooting, as a gunman kills 18 people, including a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, across Nova Scotia.

[GordMay]

April 19

1770: British explorer Captain James Cook first sights Australia.

1764: The English Parliament bans the American colonies from printing paper money.

1775: The American Revolution begins, as fighting breaks out at Lexington, Massachusetts. The "Shot Heard Round the World" took place in Concord later that day.

1882: British naturalist Charles Darwin died (aged 73), at Downe, England,

1989: The battleship USS “Iowa"s number 2 turret explodes, killing sailors.

1909: Joan of Arc receives beatification by the Roman Catholic Church.

1928: The 125th and final fascicle of the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ is published.

1939: Connecticut finally approves the U.S. Bill of Rights (148 years late).

1943: Jews refuse to surrender the Warsaw Ghetto, to SS officer Jürgen Stroop, who then orders its destruction, beginning the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was quelled four weeks later, on May 16.

1947: French ship, SS "Grandcamp" explodes in Texas City harbor, kills about 522.

1957: Researchers run the first 'FORTRAN' program. Short for "FORmula TRANslator," FORTRAN enabled computer programmers ("coders," at the time) to work in a "high-level" language, greatly simplifying program writing. The first FORTRAN program (other than internal IBM testing) runs at Westinghouse, producing a missing comma diagnostic. A successful attempt followed.

1984: ‘Nemesis’, death star of dinosaurs, 1st appears in print (Nature magazine). Scientists, at the University of California Berkley, suggested that a red dwarf star 1.5 light-years away could be the cause of the mass extinctions. Later theories have suggested that Nemesis could be a brown or white dwarf, or a low-mass star only a few times as massive as Jupiter. All would cast dim light, making them difficult to spot.
“Extinction of species by periodic comet showers” ~ by Marc Davis, Piet Hut & Richard A. Muller
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/308715a0

1987: The animated sitcom, “The Simpsons”, debuted on the Tracey Ullman Show, in the form of one-minute shorts.

1989: Number 2 Gun turret explodes, on USS “Iowa”, killing 47 sailors.

1993: The FBI ends a 51-day siege, by storming the Branch Davidian religious cult headquarters, in Waco, Texas. 76 Branch Davidians die. (accident, suicide, tear gas are disputed causes)

1995: Timothy McVeigh sets off a truck bomb at Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 and injuring 500.

2015: Boat carrying approximately 850 migrants is shipwrecked, in the Mediterranean, between Italian and Libya, with only 27 migrants rescued.

2021: New Zealand and Australia open a travel bubble, between the two countries, after more than a year of border closures.

[GordMay]

April 20

1521: Emperor of China, Zhengde died.

1611: First known performance of Shakespeare's tragedy, ‘Macbeth’, at the Globe Theatre, London.

1657: Battle in Santa Cruz Bay, Tenerife: English Admiral Robert Blake fights his last battle, when he destroys the Spanish silver fleet, in Santa Cruz Bay.

1736: French mathematician, Pierre Louis Maupertuis, begins Lapland expedition, to measure latitude and shape of the earth, joined by fellow scientists Anders Celsius, Charles Etienne Louis Camus, Alexis Clairaut, and Pierre-Charles Le Monnier.

1770: Captain James Cook arrives in New South Wales.

1792: Amidst the French Revolution, France declares war on Austria and Prussia, beginning the French Revolutionary Wars.

1809: Napoleon I and French forces defeat Austria, at Battle of Abensberg, Bavaria.

1862: First pasteurization test completed, by Frenchmen Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard. Pasteur opened a jar of dog's blood and urine, that had been sealed since March 3. It showed no signs of decay.

1889: Adolf Hitler born. He was Time magazine's 1938 "Man of the Year."

1902: Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive compound radium chloride.

1918: Manfred von Richthofen, aka ‘The Red Baron’, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, marking his final victories, before his death the following day.
1918: German/American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate, Karl Ferdinand Braun died.

1940: 1st electron microscope demonstrated by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). It had a magnification of 100,000 diameters.

1951: MIT demonstrates its “Whirlwind” machine, on Edward R. Murrow's ‘See It Now’ television series. Project director Jay Forrester describes the computer as a "reliable operating system," running 35 hours a week at 90-percent utility, using an electrostatic tube memory, that stores up to 2,048 16-digit words. The machine used 4,500 vacuum tubes and 14,800 diodes, taking up a total of 3,100 square feet.

1962: The New Orleans Citizens Committee gives free one-way bus tickets, to blacks to move North.

1973: Canadian ‘ANIK A2' becomes 1st commercial satellite in orbit.

1980: "Mariel Boatlift": Cuban President, Fidel Castro, announces he is opening the Mariel Port, for Cubans to leave, about 125,00 leave in next 5-6 months

1999: Columbine High School massacre: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people, and injure 24 others, before committing suicide, at Columbine High School, Colorado.

2010: The British Petroleum (BP) “Deepwater Horizon”, drilling rig operated by Transocean, explodes killing 11, and causing the rig to sink, resulting in a massive crude oil discharge [<200 million gallons] into the Gulf of Mexico, and an environmental disaster [the largest accidental marine oil spill in history].

2011: Japan legally enforces, previously voluntary, twelve mile evacuation zone, around the Fukushima nuclear plant.

2020: Price of US oil turns negative for the 1st time in history. West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark for US oil, falls as low as minus $37.63 a barrel, as worldwide demand falls.

[GordMay]

April 21

43 BC: Battle of Mutina: Marcus Antonius [Mark Antony] is again defeated in battle, by Aulus Hirtius [Octavian], who is killed. Antony fails to capture Mutina, and Decimus Brutus is murdered shortly after.

0753: Traditional date of the foundation of Rome [Romulus and Remus].

1782: Friedrich Froebel, German educational reformer, and the founder of the ‘kindergarten’, was born in Oberweissbach, Thuringia.

1820: Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted is the first to identify electromagnetism, when he observes a compass needle.

1836: General Sam Houston defeats Santa Anna, at the Battle of San Jacinto. Texas wins independence from Mexico.

1878: Ship “Azor” leaves Charleston with 206 blacks for Liberia.

1908: American polar explorer Frederick Cook claims to have been the 1st person reach North Pole on this date (disputed).

1926: Elizabeth Alexandra Mary [Queen Elizabeth II] born in Mayfair, London England.

1952: BOAC begins 1st passenger service with jets (London-Rome route).

1956: Elvis Presley's 1st hit record, "Heartbreak Hotel", becomes Billboard #1.

1960: Brasilia becomes the capital of Brazil, transferring the seat of national government from Rio de Janeiro.

1970: The ‘Principality of Hutt River’ (previously Hutt River Province) secedes from Australia - it remains unrecognised by Australia, or other nations.

1976: Swine Flu vaccine, for non-epidemic, enters testing.

1982: Dr Michael E Bakey performs 1st successful heart implant.

1984: Centers for Disease Control says virus, discovered in France, causes AIDS.

1988: Tandy Corp. holds a press conference, in New York, to announce its plans to build clones of IBM's 'PS/2' system computers. The conference comes on the heels of IBM's announcement that it would license patents on key PC technologies, a move that signaled its willingness to let other companies clone its machines. Within five years, IBM clones became more popular than original IBM machines themselves.

1989: Hundreds of thousands of Chinese crowd into Beijing's Tiananmen Square, cheering students demanding greater political freedom. This was the beginning of the mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, prior to the Chinese Government declaring martial law in May of the same year, which led to the June Massacres by Chinese troops, killing hundreds of demonstrators, and arresting thousands of protesters and other suspected dissidents.

1991: French underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio discovers the “San Diego”, Dutch galleon, sunk in 1600, off Fortune Island, in the Philippines.

1994: The first discoveries of extrasolar planets are announced, orbiting the pulsar 'PSR 1257+12', by astronomer Alexander Wolszczan.

[GordMay]

April 22

1056: Supernova ‘Crab nebula’ last seen by the naked eye.

1370: Building begins on the ‘Bastille’ fortress, in Paris.

1500: Pedro Álvares Cabral is the first European to discover Brazil, landing near Monte Pascoal, claims it for Portugal.

1592: Wilhelm Schickard, creator of an early calculating machine, is born in Germany. Schickard uses wooden gears to build an adding machine in 1623, called the "calculating clock," that could add and subtract up to six-digit numbers.

1659: Lord Protector Richard Cromwell disbands English parliament.

1724: Immanuel Kant born.

1817: Curacao prohibits use of white paint, due to fierce sunlight.

1838: English steamship "Sirius" docks in NYC, after crossing the Atlantic, first transatlantic steam passenger service.

1870: Vladimir Lenin born.

1903: American Power Boat Association forms.

1954: US Senate ‘Army-McCarthy’ televised hearings begin.

1969: Robin Knox-Johnston ends 312 day RTW at Falmouth [Sunday Times Golden Globe Race], officially the first person to circumnavigate the globe non-stop and single-handed sailing, aboard 32 Ft. “Suhaili”.

1970: First ‘Earth Day’ celebrated, founded by Gaylord Nelson.

1977: Optical fiber is used for telephone transmissions, for the first time.

1991: Intel releases ‘486SX’ chip.

1994: Borge Ousland is the 1st person, on a solo, and unsupported journey to reach the North Pole.
1994: Richard Nixon died [stroke], at the age of 81.

1999: Luis Garavito [The Beast, Tribilín], Colombian serial killer, described as "the world's worst serial killer" (138-300+ victims) apprehended.

2010: The Transocean oil platform “Deepwater Horizon” sinks into the Gulf of Mexico, 2 days after the explosion and fire on the April 20th, early estimates indicate leaking 8,000 barrels of crude oil per day ( 300,000 gallons per day ).

2016: ‘Paris Agreement’ on climate change signed, in New York, binding 195 nations to an increase in the global average temperature to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C.
1970: First ‘Earth Day’ celebrated, founded by Gaylord Nelson.

[GordMay]

April 23

1516: Duke Wilhelm IV, of Bavaria, endorses "The German Beer Purity Law" (Reinheitsgebot), and adds to it standards for the sale of beer in Bavaria, ensuring beer is only brewed from three ingredients – water, malt and hops.

1564: According to tradition, the great English dramatist and poet, William Shakespeare is born in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is impossible to be certain the exact day on which he was born, but church records show that he was baptized on April 26, and three days was a customary amount of time to wait before baptizing a newborn.
Shakespeare’s date of death is conclusively known, however: it was April 23, 1616. He was 52 years old, and had retired to Stratford three years before.

1759: British forces seize Basse-Terre and Guadeloupe from France.

1827: Irish mathematician and astronomer, William Rowan Hamilton, presents his ‘Theory of Systems of Rays’.

1858: German physicist Max Planck, who originated quantum theory, was born in Kiel.

1867: Queen Victoria & Napoleon III turn down plans for a channel tunnel.

1915: The ‘ACA; becomes the National Advisory Council on Aeronautics (NACA), the forerunner of ‘NASA’.

1964: ‘SEAC’ Computer Retired. The National Bureau of Standards retires its SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer), which it built in Washington 15 years earlier, as a laboratory for testing components and systems, for setting computer standards. The SEAC was the first computer to use all-diode logic, a technology more reliable than vacuum tubes, and the first stored-program computer completed in the United States. Magnetic tape, in the external storage units, stores programming information, coded subroutines, numerical data, and output.

1967: ‘Soyuz 1' launched; Vladimir Komarov becomes 1st in-flight casualty.

1969: Sirhan Sirhan is sentenced to death, for killing Senator Robert F. Kennedy (later computed to life sentence).

1982: ‘Conch Republic’ is established - secession of the Florida Keys from the United States of America.
1982: The 8-bit personal home computer, the Sinclair ‘ZX Spectrum’, is released (goes on to sell 5 million worldwide).

1984: AIDS-virus identified as ‘HTLV-III’ (acquired immune deficiency syndrome).

1985: Coca-Cola announced that it was changing its formula, and introduced 'New Coke' [Project Kansas].

1991: USSR grants republics right to secede, under certain conditions.

1998: James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., died in prison in Nashville, Tennessee.

2003: Beijing closes all schools for two weeks, because of the SARS virus.

2005: The first 'YouTube' video, which was of YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim's visit to the San Diego Zoo, was uploaded on the YouTube Web site; approximately one year later the site had some 100 million videos.

2007: Russian politician Boris Yeltsin, who became in 1991 the first popularly elected leader in his country's history, and guided Russia through a stormy decade of political and economic retrenching, until his resignation on the eve of 2000 - died in Moscow.

2009: Gamma ray burst (GRB) ‘090423' is observed for 10 seconds, the most distant object of any kind, and also the oldest known object in the universe.

2019: World's first malaria vaccine, giving partial protection to children, begins in Malawi by the WHO.

[GordMay]

April 24

1479 BC: Thutmose III, ascends to the throne of Egypt, although power effectively shifts to Hatshepsut (according to the Low Chronology of the 18th Dynasty).

1184 BC: The Greeks enter Troy using the Trojan Horse (traditional date).

1519: Envoys of Montezuma II attend the first Easter mass, in Central America.

1792: The first guillotine was erected, on the Place de Grève in Paris, to execute a highwayman.

1800: President John Adams approves legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress,” thus establishing the Library of Congress.

1805: U.S. Marines attack and capture the town of Derna, in Tripoli, from the Barbary pirates.

1859: Construction of the Suez Canal officially began; completed 10 years later, the waterway connected the Mediterranean and Red seas.

1872: Volcano Mt ‘Vesuvius’ erupts, in Italy.

1895: Canadian-American adventurer Joshua Slocum sets sail from Boston, Massachusetts on a solo around-the-world voyage aboard “Spray”, an 11.2-m oyster sloop.
“Sailing Alone Around The World” ~ by Joshua Slocum
➥ The Project Gutenberg eBook of Sailing Alone Around The World, by Captain Joshua Slocum.

1898: US fleet, under commodore George Dewey, sails from Hong Kong to Philippines.
1898: Spanish–American War: Spain declares war after rejecting US ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.

1908: Mr & Mrs Jacob Murdock become 1st to travel across US by car, they leave LA in a Packard, & arrive in NYC in 32days-5h-25m.

1915: Turks, of the Ottoman Empire, begin massacring the Armenian minority in their country. An estimated 1 million people were killed, in the Armenian Massacres, during and after World War I. The event is considered one of the first genocides in modern history.

1916: Easter Rising, of Irish republicans, against British occupation, begins in Dublin.
1916: Ernest Shackleton, and five men of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, launch a lifeboat from uninhabited Elephant Island, in the Southern Ocean, to organise a rescue for ice-trapped ship “Endurance”.

1928: Fathometer, which measures underwater depth, patented, by Herbert Grove Dorsey.

1948: The Berlin airlift begins to relieve the surrounded city.

1961: 17th century Swedish warship “Vasa”, which sunk on her maiden voyage in 1628, is salvaged.

1962: Massachusetts Institute of Technology sends TV signal, by satellite, for 1st time: California to Massachusetts.

1981: Apple Computer introduces its Apple ‘IIc’, a portable machine designed to have the same operating capacity as the standard IIe model. The machine came with 128 kilobytes of RAM, and a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drive.

1990: ‘STS-31' [‘Discovery’] launches, the 35th mission of the US Space Shuttle program, carrying the ‘Hubble’ space telescope. Unhindered by the impurities and distortions of Earth's atmosphere, the 2.4 meter (7.9 feet) aperture telescope has delivered some of the most spectacular images of the far reaches of the Universe.
1990: Gruinard Island, Scotland, is officially declared free of the anthrax disease, after 48 years of quarantine.

2013: Deadliest structural failure in history, when 1,134, mostly garment workers, killed, and 2,500 injured, after the ‘Rana Plaza’ building collapses, in Savar Upazila, Bangladesh.

2014: In a cost-saving measure, the water supply of Flint, Michigan, was switched from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, to the Flint River, causing a public health crisis as residents were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead.

2015: A magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck, near Kathmandu, Nepal, causing widespread damage, and killing several thousand.

[GordMay]

April 25

1507: German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller first to use the name “America”, on his world map "Universalis Cosmographia".

1719: Daniel Defoe's novel, ‘Robinson Crusoe’ is published in London.

1744: Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius died.

1829: Charles Fremantle arrives, in HMS “Challenger”, off the coast of modern-day Western Australia, prior to declaring the Swan River Colony for the United Kingdom.

1862: Union Admiral, David Farragut, occupies New Orleans, Louisiana.

1874: Guglielmo Marconi born.

1915: Australian and New Zealand [ANZAC] troops land at Gaba Tepe and Cape Helles, Gallipoli, in Turkey.

1928: ‘Buddy’, a German Shepherd, becomes 1st guide dog, for a US citizen, Morris Frank.

1945: 45 countries convene UN Conference on International Organization, in San Francisco.

1953: The magazine ‘Nature’ publishes an article by biologists Francis Crick and James Watson, describing the "double helix" of DNA.

1954: Bell labs announces the 1st ‘solar battery’ [photo-voltaic cell] made from silicon. It has about 6% efficiency.
In the early 1950s, R.S. Ohl had discovered that sunlight striking a wafer of silicon would produce unexpectedly large numbers of free electrons. In 1954,G.L. Pearson, C.S. Fuller, and D.M. Chapin created an array of several strips of silicon (each about the size of a razor blade), placed them in sunlight, captured the free electrons and turned them into electrical current.

1959: The St. Lawrence Seaway,linking the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, opens to shipping.

1960: The first submerged circumnavigation of the Earth ['Operation Sandblast'] is completed by USS “Triton” submarine, in 60 days, 21 hours.

1961: The US Patent Office issues Robert Noyce a patent, for the integrated circuit, starting a long battle with Jack Kilby, over who had rights to the patent. Kilby had invented a germanium version of the circuits, while Noyce developed the silicon integrated circuit; the one that grew to be more accepted.

1971: The country of Bangladesh is established.

1981: More than 100 workers are exposed to radiation, during repairs of a nuclear power plant in Tsuruga, Japan.

2003: The Human Genome Project, to determine the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA of the human genome, consisting of 20,000-25,000 genes, started in 1990, is published. The project started in the US with James D. Watson who was head of the National Center for Human Genome Research at the National Institutes of Health but over the next 10 years geneticists in China, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom all worked together on the project helping the project end two years earlier than planned. One of the most important aspects of this research is it available to available to anyone on the Internet and not owned or controlled by any one company or government.

2019: Microsoft becomes the third US firm to be listed with a market worth of 1 trillion, after Apple and Amazon.

[GordMay]

April 26

1478: The Pazzi family, of Florence, led an unsuccessful plot to overthrow the ruling Medici family. Pazzi conspirators attack Lorenzo, and kill Giuliano de' Medici.

1514: Nicolaus Copernicus makes his first observations of Saturn.

1920: Harlow Shapley and Heber D. Curtis hold ‘great debate’, on the nature of nebulae, galaxies and size of the universe, at US National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.

1928: Pedro Flores, a Filipino immigrant to the United States, opened the ‘Yo-yo Manufacturing Company’ in Santa Barbara, California. By November 1929, Flores was operating two additional factories in Los Angeles and Hollywood, which altogether employed 600 workers and produced 300,000 Yo Yo's daily.

1952: US minesweeper “Hobson” rams aircraft carrier “Wasp”, kills 176.

1954: Mass trials of Jonas Salk's anti-polio vaccine begin; the first shot is delivered in Fairfax County, Virginia; more than 443,000 children receive shots over three months.

1956: First modern container ship, the “Ideal X”, leaves Port Newark, New Jersey for Houston, Texas.

1960: IBM sends out an upbeat release on supercomputers, and its own ‘STRETCH’ (also known as the IBM 7030). "The $10-million-and-up class computers are the world's fastest and most powerful. They are similar to the STRETCH computer which IBM is now completing for the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, New Mexico. IBM will now contract with business firms and government agencies to build STRETCH type computers. They can complete 100 billion computations in a day. The new machines are seventy-five times faster than the large-scale IBM 704 computer"

1975: In the run up to the national referendum, on June 5th, the British Labour Party votes, by almost 2-1, to leave the ‘European Economic Community’. In the national referendum, in June, British voters back the UK's continued membership of the European Economic Community, with just over 67% of voters supporting the campaign to stay in the EEC, or Common Market.

1982: Argentina surrenders to Great Britain, on South Georgia Island, near the Falkland Islands.

1986: Chornobyl

1990: NY court of appeals ends 2½ year legal battle over 1988 America's Cup, by refusing jurisdiction of case.

1994: Physicists announce first evidence of the ‘top quark’ subatomic particle.
1994: 1st day of voting in first ever multi-racial elections in South Africa, Dr Nomaza Paintin in NZ is 1st black South African to vote.

2009: Responding to, what health officials are fearing is the beginning of a global pandemic, American health officials have declared a public health emergency, from the twenty cases of swine flu, that have been confirmed. Other nations have imposed travel bans, or made plans to quarantine air travelers, if more cases are confirmed in Mexico. Top flu experts have struggled to predict how dangerous the new A (H1N1) flu strain will be, as it is becoming clear that they have received too little information on the Mexico outbreak. They cannot tell whether the virus has mutating into a more lethal strain, or is weakening.

2018: After 40 years, serial killer, Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. ["Golden State Killer"] identified, as a former police officer, responsible for 12 killings, 50 rapes in California.