Interesting Facts

16th August 1819 – Seventeen people die and over 600 were injured in cavalry charges at a public meeting at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, England, which was held to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. This became known as The Peterloo Massacre. 1902 – Georgette Heyer, English author was born. 1906 – An estimated 8.2 MW earthquake hit Valparaíso, Chile, killing 3,886 people. 1913 – Tōhoku Imperial University of Japan (modern day Tohoku University) becomes the first university in Japan to admit female students. 1946 – Mass riots in Kolkata began, in which more than 4,000 people were murdered over the next 72 hours. 1960 – Cyprus gained its independence from the United Kingdom. 1974 – Punk Rock pioneers The Ramones played their first show in a local New York club called CBGB. 1977 - Elvis Presley died. 2012 – South African police fatally shot 34 miners and wounded 78 more during an industrial dispute near Rustenburg.

1906 - Rolls Royce was founded. (And I still haven't been in one!)

Gideon Sundback, a Swedish-American electrical engineer, is credited with the invention of the zipper. (He was born on April 24th 1880 in Sweden, but the development work on the zip was carried out in the US as head designer at Universal Fastener. Sundback made several advances in the development of the zipper between 1906 and 1914, while working for companies that later evolved into Talon, Inc. He built upon the previous work of other engineers such as Elias Howe, Max Wolff, and Whitcomb Judson. He was responsible for improving the "Judson C-curity Fastener". At that time the company's product was still based on hooks and eyes. Sundback developed an improved version of the C-curity, called the "Plako", but it too had a strong tendency to pull apart, and wasn't any more successful than the previous versions. Sundback finally solved the pulling-apart problem in 1913, with his invention of the first version not based on the hook-and-eye principle, the ...