(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