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1880 the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison was granted a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.
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1944 Leningrad (now St Petersburg) was relieved after a 28-month siege.
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1945 the Soviet army liberated 5,000 inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
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1967 Virgil Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee, astronauts, died after an electrical fault ignited pure oxygen in their Apollo 1 spacecraft.
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1972 Mahalia Jackson, the “Queen of Gospel”, died.
814 Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor since 800, died aged 71.
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1547 King Henry VIII, who had reigned since 1509, died aged 55.
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1596 Sir Francis Drake, English admiral and circumnavigator of the globe, died aged 55 at Portobelo, Panama.
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1807 London’s Pall Mall became the first street in the world illuminated by gaslight.
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1896 the first speeding fine was imposed on a British motorist for exceeding 2mph in a built-up area.
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1986 the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after lift-off and its crew of five men and two women were killed.
1819 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles landed in Singapore, with it becoming a British colony five years later.
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1820 King George III, who had reigned since 1760, died aged 81.
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1856 the Victoria Cross was established by royal warrant to honour acts of valour during the Crimean War.
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1860 Anton Chekhov, playwright, was born in Taganrog, Russia.
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1886 Karl Benz patented the first automobile.
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1942 Desert Island Discs was first broadcast by the BBC.
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1996 Venice’s opera house, fatefully named La Fenice (The Phoenix), was completely destroyed by fire, suspected to be arson.
1649 King Charles I, who had reigned since 1625, was executed in Whitehall.
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1661 Oliver Cromwell was ritually executed, more than two years after his death.
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1790 the first lifeboat was tested by Henry Greathead of South Shields.
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1933 Hitler was sworn in as German chancellor.
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1948 Mahatma Gandhi, Indian leader, was assassinated in Delhi.
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1965 Sir Winston Churchill’s state funeral took place in London.
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1968 the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive against South Vietnam.
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1972 British troops killed 13 people during a civil rights march in Londonderry on what is now known as Bloody Sunday.
1606 Guy Fawkes and his fellow Gunpowder Plot conspirators were executed.
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1788 Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie), leader of the Jacobite rebellion, died in Rome aged 68.
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1858 the Great Eastern steamship, the largest vessel in the world, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was launched.
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1929 Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union.
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1983 the wearing of front seatbelts in cars was made compulsory in Britain.
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1990 the first McDonald’s restaurant in Russia opened in Pushkin Square, Moscow.
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2010 Avatar became the first film to gross more than $2 billion worldwide.
1851 Mary Shelley, who at 21 wrote Frankenstein, died aged 54.
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1874 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, poet, dramatist and librettist (Der Rosenkavalier), was born in Vienna.
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1884 publication of the first fascicle of the Oxford English Dictionary.
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1896 the world premiere of Puccini’s opera La Bohème took place in Turin, with Arturo Toscanini conducting.
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1910 the first British labour exchange opened.
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1915 Stanley Matthews, footballer, was born in Stoke-on-Trent.
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1924 Britain formally recognised the Soviet Union.
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