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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