Interesting Facts

18th June 1429 – French forces under the leadership of Joan of Arc defeated the main English army under Sir John Fastolf at the Battle of Patay. This turned the tide of the Hundred Years' War. 1767 – Samuel Wallis, an English sea captain, sighted Tahiti and is considered the first European to reach the island. 1812 - The United States declared war on on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 1815 – The Battle of Waterloo led to Napoleon Bonaparte abdicating the throne of France for the second and final time. 1858 – Charles Darwin received a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace that included nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin's own. This prompted Darwin to publish his theory. 1873 – Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for attempting to vote in the 1872 US presidential election. (The 19th Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution, which prohibits each of the states and the federal government from denying any citizen the right t...

20th May 1506 - Christopher Columbus died in poverty in Spain. 1570 – Cartographer Abraham Ortelius issued the first modern atlas. 1609 – Shakespeare's Sonnets were first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe. 1631 – The city of Magdeburg in Germany was seized by forces of the Holy Roman Empire and most of its inhabitants massacred, in one of the bloodiest incidents of the Thirty Years' War. 1873 – Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets. 1902 – Cuba gained independence from the United States. Tomás Estrada Palma became the first President of Cuba. 1927 - Charles Lindbergh took off for Paris from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, N.Y., aboard the Spirit of St. Louis on the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean. 1932 – Amelia Earhart took off from Newfoundland to begin the world's first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean by a female pilot. She landed in Irel...

1st April 1318 - Berwick-upon-Tweed was captured by the Scottish from the English. 1826 - Samuel Morey patented the internal combustion engine. 1867 - Singapore became a British crown colony. 1873 - The British steamer RMS Atlantic sank off Nova Scotia, 547 people died. 1891 - The Wrigley Company was founded in Chicago, Illinois. 1918 - The Royal Air Force was created by the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. 1924 - Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in jail for his participation in the "Beer Hall Putsch". However, he spent only nine months in jail, during which time he wrote the book Mein Kampf. (Just shows you prison is no deterrent.) 1949 - The twenty-six counties of the Irish Free State became the Republic of Ireland. 1976 - Apple Computer was formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. 1979 - Iran became an Islamic Republic by a 98% vote, officially overthrowing the Shah. 1981 - Daylight saving time was introduced ...

The first recorded idea for a typewriter is dated 1714 when an Englishman called Henry Mill patented his idea for "an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another." (But, it wasn't until 1808 that Italian Pellegrino Turri built the first working machine of its kind. Turri made the typewriter for his friend Countess Carolina Fantoni da Fivizzano, but the first commercial production wasn't until 1873 .)