Today in History

1st March

1950 A top nuclear scientist was jailed for fourteen years at the Old Bailey for spying for the Soviet Union. Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs, 38, a civil servant from Harwell in Berkshire, pleaded guilty to four offences under the Official Secrets Act. German-born Fuchs, who fled his home country to escape Nazi persecution in 1933, had come to be regarded as one of Britain's top atomic scientists. But beneath the facade was a committed Communist who had been passing secrets to the Russians.

1966 Britain to go decimal in 1971. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callaghan, confirmed the "historic and momentous" decision to change over to decimal coinage.

1978 Charlie Chaplin's coffin was stolen from a Swiss cemetery.

2006 The Senedd in Cardiff Bay, was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II. It is the main public building of the National Assembly, the main centre for democracy and devolution in Wales. March 1st is St David’s Day – the day that the people of Wales home and abroad commemorate their patron saint and it was therefore fitting that the new, purpose –built home of the National Assembly should be opened on this day. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
 

On This Day In History, March 3rd

1991 Footage of Los Angeles police officers severely beating Rodney King causes a global outcry
The acquittal of the police officers involved sparked the Los Angeles riots in 1992.

1985 The U.K. miners' strike ends
The year-long dispute was the country's longest-running industrial dispute and a defining issue of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government.

1974 All 345 people on board a Turkish Airlines jet die as it plunges to the ground near Paris, France
The crash of the DC-10 aircraft has the 4th highest death toll of any aviation accident in history.

1938 The world's fastest steam locomotive is built
The Mallard could reach a speed of over 100 miles per hour (160 km/h).

1924 The last remnant of the Ottoman empire in Turkey is abolished
The end of the Islamic caliphate marked the demise of the 600-year-old empire and gave way to the formation of a reformed Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
 
Births On This Day, March 3rd 🎂

1981 Julius Malema
South African politician

1977 Ronan Keating
Irish singer-songwriter, actor

1869 Henry Wood
English conductor

1847 Alexander Graham Bell
Scottish/American engineer invented the Telephone

1845 Georg Cantor
German mathematician

Deaths On This Day, March 3rd 🪦

1987 Danny Kaye
American actor

1983 Hergé
Belgian illustrator

1707 Aurangzeb
Mughal Emperor

1706 Johann Pachelbel
German composer

1703 Robert Hooke
English scientist
 

4th March 1946
Columbia Records releases Frank Sinatra's first studio album, "The Voice Of Frank Sinatra".
Issued as a set of four, 78 rpm records totaling eight songs, the album went to #1 on the fledgling Billboard chart, where it stayed for seven weeks. The chart, which was first published the previous year, consisted of only the Top Five albums.
 
4th March 1959
The winners of the first Grammy Awards were announced.
Domenico Modugno's "Volare" was named Record of the Year;
Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn" was Album of the Year
The Champs "Tequila" won best R&B performance.
Variety took great delight when it later reported - "The record academy has snubbed the Rock. Not one Rock 'n' Roll record was nominated."
 
4th March 1966
John Lennon caused a major stir in the United States when London's Evening Standard newspaper published an interview with him in which he remarked, "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue that. I'm right and will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus right now."
Lennon would later apologize, explaining that what he meant was "the way some people carry on, (screaming at their concerts) you'd think we were more popular than Jesus Christ".
Thousands of Beatle records were smashed at mass rallies and some radio stations quit playing their songs altogether. John's apology was eventually accepted by most and time has healed most wounds.
 
4th March

1681 King Charles II granted a Royal Charter to William Penn, entitling him to establish a colony in North America called Pennsylvania.

1824 The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI was formed) by Sir William Hillary. Initially known as the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck, Hillary was inspired to form the charitable organization when he saw a fishing fleet destroyed by a storm off the Isle of Man.

1890 The Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland was opened by the Prince of Wales. The bridge is more than one and a half miles long and took six years to build.

1969 The Kray twins, Ronald and Reginald, were found guilty of murder.

1975 Charlie Chaplin was knighted after a ceremony at Buckingham Palace.

1976 An Irish born mother-of-four, plus six other people, (known collectively as the Maguire Seven) were jailed for possessing explosives. Their convictions were later quashed.
 
On This Day In History, March 5th

1981 The home computer ZX81 is launched
The British ZX81 was one of the world's first home computers and was sold over 1.5 million times.

1970 The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty enters into force
Nuclear powers China, Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and France initiated the treaty in 1968. It has since been ratified by 190 nations around the world.

1960 Alberto Korda takes his famous picture of revolutionary Che Guevara
The iconic photograph, called Guerrillero Heroico, was taken at a memorial service for the victims of the La Coubre explosion.

1872 The air brake is patented
George Westinghouse is credited with the design of the railway braking system that uses compressed air.

1616 Nicolaus Copernicus' revolutionary book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium is banned by the Catholic Church
In the book, Copernicus claimed that the Earth revolves around the sun. The Church maintained Ptolemy's geocentric system. The book is considered a milestone in the history of astronomy.
 
Births On This Day, March 5th 🎂

1970 John Frusciante
American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer

1951 Lat
Malaysian cartoonist

1948 Elaine Paige
English singer, actress

1898 Zhou Enlai
Chinese politician, 1st Premier of the People's Republic of China

1871 Rosa Luxemburg
Russian economist, philosopher

Deaths On This Day, March 5th 🪦

2013 Hugo Chávez
Venezuelan military officer, politician, President of Venezuela

1963 Patsy Cline
American singer-songwriter, pianist

1953 Sergei Prokofiev
Russian pianist, composer, conductor

1953 Joseph Stalin
Soviet marshal, politician, 4th Premier of the Soviet Union

1895 Nikolai Leskov
Russian author, playwright, journalist
 
5th March

1824 The First Anglo-Burmese War: The British officially declared war on Burma.

1946 Prime Minister Winston Churchill coined the phrase 'The Iron Curtain' as the divide between Eastern and Western Europe. “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent”.

1966 BOAC Flight 911 (Speedbird 911), a round-the-world flight operated by British Overseas Airways Corporation disintegrated and crashed on Mount Fuji, Japan, killing all 113 passengers and 11 crew members. It was the third fatal passenger airline accident in Tokyo in a month.

1993 The disgraced Olympic sprinter, Ben Johnson, was banned from athletics for life after failing a drugs test for a second time.
 
On This Day In History, March 6th

1987 193 people die when a ferry capsizes in the North Sea
The Herald of Free Enterprise sank just minutes after leaving the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.

1967 Stalin's daughter defects to the West
The Soviet dictator's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, caused an international uproar when she approached the United States embassy in New Delhi and later became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

1957 Ghana becomes the first African country to gain independence from colonial rule
Ghana emerged as a sovereign state from the former British colonies Gold Coast and Togoland. Kwame Nkrumah was the country's first leader.

1899 The painkiller Asprin is registered as a trademark
Acetylsalicylic acid was first isolated in 1897 by German chemist Felix Hoffmann. Today, the medication is sold by Bayer and is on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.

1869 The first periodic table of chemical elements is presented
Dmitri Mendeleev presented the system to the Russian Chemical Society on that day.
 

Births On This Day, March 6 🎂

1972 Shaquille O'Neal
American basketball player, actor, rapper

1946 David Gilmour
English singer-songwriter, guitarist

1936 Marion Barry
American politician, 2nd Mayor of the District of Columbia

1926 Alan Greenspan
American economist

1475 Michelangelo
Italian painter, sculptor

Deaths On This Day, March 6th 🪦

2007 Jean Baudrillard
French philosopher

1986 Georgia O'Keeffe
American painter

1982 Ayn Rand
Russian/American author, philosopher

1900 Gottlieb Daimler
German engineer, businessman, co-founded Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft

1842 Constanze Mozart
German wife of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
 
On This Day In History, March 7th

1971 A speech by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman helps spark the Bangladesh War of independence
Bangladesh's founding leader made his historical speech at a time of mounting tensions between East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh, and West Pakistan, which became present-day Pakistan.

1965 Police brutally attack civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama
Scores of demonstrators were injured, and the day entered history books as Bloody Sunday. The event helped to shift public opinion in favour of the Civil Rights movement.

1945 U.S. troops capture the Ludendorff Bridge and cross the Rhine at Remagen
The legendary capture yielded little strategic advantage but it elevated the morale of the U.S. troops in pursuit of retreating German fighters,

1926 The first two-way transatlantic telephone takes place
The conversation between the post office in London and Bell Laboratories in New York was established using a short-wave radio signal.

1900 The SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse becomes the first ship to send wireless signals to shore
The German transatlantic liner was fitted with wireless communication by its owner, Norddeutscher Lloyd, in order to outdo its rival Hamburg America Line.
 
Births On This Day, March 7th 🎂

1970 Rachel Weisz
English actress

1960 Ivan Lendl
Czech tennis player

1944 Townes Van Zandt
American singer-songwriter, guitarist

1902 Heinz Rühmann
German actor

1875 Maurice Ravel
French composer

Deaths On This Day, March 7th 🪦

2006 Ali Farka Touré
Malian singer-songwriter, guitarist

1999 Stanley Kubrick
American director

1975 Mikhail Bakhtin
Russian philosopher

1952 Paramahansa Yogananda
Indian guru

1274 Saint Thomas Aquinas
Italian priest, philosopher
 
On This Day In History, March 8th

1979 The compact disc is presented to the public
The CD was developed by Philips and Sony. The companies later collaborated to produce a standard format and CD players.

1978 The first episode of the radio comedy The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is broadcast
Douglas Adams' radio play was a major success with BBC Radio 4 listeners. The book version consisting of five novels - A Trilogy in Five Parts - became a worldwide success.

1971 In the Fight of the Century, Joe Frazier triumphs over Muhammad Ali
Ali had been stripped of his World Heavyweight Champion title in 1967 for refusing to serve in the armed forces. As he was still undefeated, Frazier had to beat him to be recognized as the world champion.

1910 Raymonde de Laroche becomes the first woman with a pilot's license
The French aviatrix was also the first woman to fly solo. She died at the age of 36 when her experimental plane crashed at Le Crotoy airfield in northern France.

1817 The New York Stock Exchange is founded
The NYSE at 11 Wall Street in New York City is the world's largest stock exchange.
 
Births On This Day, March 8th 🎂

1990 Petra Kvitová
Czech tennis player

1952 George Allen
American politician, 67th Governor of Virginia

1907 Konstantinos Karamanlis
Greek politician, 3rd President of Greece

1879 Otto Hahn
German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate

1841 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
American jurist

Deaths On This Day, March 8th 🪦

1999 Joe DiMaggio
American baseball player

1942 José Raúl Capablanca
Cuban chess player

1930 William Howard Taft
American politician, 27th President of the United States

1917 Ferdinand von Zeppelin
German general, businessman

1869 Hector Berlioz
French composer
 
8th March

1930 Mahatma Gandhi began the campaign of civil disobedience against British rule in India.

1937 The Road To Wigan Pier, George Orwell's book depicting life during 'The Depression' in the north of England, was published. Wigan pier was simply a place for loading coal onto canal boats on the Leeds - Liverpool canal.

1963 The first Ford Anglia was produced at Halewood, LIverpool.

1966 A bomb planted by young Irish protesters destroyed Nelson's Pillar in Dublin. No one was hurt by the explosion. Six days after the original damage, Irish Army engineers blew up the rest of the pillar after judging the structure to be too unsafe to restore. The planned demolition caused more destruction on O'Connell Street than the original blast, and broke many windows.

1972 A bomb exploded aboard a Trans World Airlines Boeing 707 at Las Vegas airport. No-one was injured in the blast which destroyed the cockpit of the aircraft as it stood empty on the tarmac.

2001 Divers raised the wreck of Donald Campbell's boat, Bluebird, from the bottom of Coniston Water in Cumbria. The boat had lain there since the accident in 1967 which killed Campbell, 46, as he attempted to break the world water speed record.
 
On This Day In History, March 9th

2011 Space Shuttle Discovery completes its final mission
The shuttle touched down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida after its journey to the International Space Station (ISS).

1976 The deadliest cable car accident in history occurs in Italy
43 people died when the cable car plunged 160 ft (50 meters) to the ground after the steel cable had snapped. 14-year-old Alessandra Piovesana was the only survivor.

1961 Ivan Ivanovich, a human dummy, travels into space
On its test flight on board the Soviet spacecraft Korabl-Sputnik 4 (also known as Sputnik 9), the mannequin was accompanied by a dog, reptiles, mice, and guinea pigs.

1959 The Barbie doll goes on sale
The American toy company Mattel claims that more than one billion Barbie dolls have been sold so far, with about 3 dolls being sold every second.

1931 The electron microscope is invented
German physicist Ernst Ruska is credited with the invention of the microscope. His first instrument allowed a resolution of 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter).
 
Births On This Day, March 9th 🎂

1964 Juliette Binoche
French actress, dancer

1943 Bobby Fischer
American chess player

1934 Yuri Gagarin
Russian pilot, astronaut

1915 Johnnie Johnson
English pilot

1890 Vyacheslav Molotov
Soviet politician, Minister of Foreign Affairs fr the Soviet Union

Deaths On This Day, March 9th 🪦

1997 The Notorious B.I.G.
American rapper

1996 George Burns
American actor

1994 Charles Bukowski
American poet

1992 Menachem Begin
Israeli politician, 6th Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Prize laureate

1825 Anna Laetitia Barbauld
English poet, author, critic
 
On This Day In History, March 10th

2000 The dot-com bubble bursts when the NASDAQ Composite stock market index peaks at 5408.60
The dot-com boom, which started in 1997, accompanied the advent of countless new Internet-based companies. When the speculative bubble burst, many small investors were affected.

1959 A revolt erupts in Lhasa, sparking the Tibetan uprising
Fearing the Dalai Lama's abduction by China, 300,000 Tibetans surrounded his palace.

1952 Fulgencio Batista assumes power in Cuba after a coup
The dictator was overthrown by rebels under the command of Che Guevara in 1959.

1945 The most destructive bombing raid in history hits Tokyo
About 100,000 Tokyo citizens died in the fires caused by the U.S. Air Force's incendiary bombs.

1876 The first telephone call is made
Alexander Graham Bell transmitted the words “Mr. Watson, come here -- I want to see you” to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, who was in the next-door room.
 


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