Interesting Facts

8th August 1503 – King James IV of Scotland married Margaret Tudor, daughter of King Henry VII of England at Holyrood Abbey in Edinburgh, Scotland. 1585 – John Davis entered the Cumberland Sound in search of the Northwest Passage. 1709 – The first documented balloon flight in Europe was demonstrated by Bartolomeu de Gusmão, in Lisbon. It did not end well, but he was the first. 1786 – Mont Blanc on the French – Italian border was climbed for the first time by Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard. 1793 – The insurrection of Lyon occured during the French Revolution. 1794 – Joseph Whidbey led an expedition to search for the Northwest Passage near Juneau, Alaska. 1876 – Thomas Edison received a patent for his mimeograph. 1908 – Wilbur Wright made his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France. It was the Wright Brothers' first public flight. 1929 – The German airship Graf Zeppelin began a round-the-world flight. 1942 – The Quit India Movement was laun...

1st August 1907 - Robert Baden-Powell opened the first experimental Scout camp on Brownsea Island. 20 scouts attended. 1908 - Lloyd George introduced the Old Age Pensions Act that provided between 1s. and 5s. a week to people over seventy. These pensions were only paid to citizens on incomes that were not over 12s.

30th June 1860 – The 1860 Oxford evolution debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History took place. 1908 – The Tunguska event occured in Siberia. 1936 - Gone with the Wind was published. 1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, took place. 1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolled off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan, USA. (I wonder if it was a little red one.) 1960 – Congo gained independence from Belgium. 1963 – A car bomb, intended for Mafia boss Salvatore Greco, killed seven police and military officers near Palermo. 1969 – Nigeria banned Red Cross aid to Biafra, leaving over 4 million people to face starvation. 1971 - Three Russian cosmonauts were found dead in their Soyuz 11 space capsule after it made what looked like a perfect landing in Kazakhstan. 1985 - 39 Americans being held captive by the Shia Muslim Amal militia in Lebanon were released, after almost three weeks in ...

8th April 1820 – The famous statue, the Venus de Milo, was discovered on the Aegean island of Melos. 1886 – William Ewart Gladstone introduced the first Irish Home Rule Bill into the British House of Commons. 1904 – The French Third Republic and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland signed the Entente cordiale. 1908 – Harvard University voted to establish the Harvard Business School. 1994 - Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, 27, was found dead in his Seattle home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. 1995 - British-born Nicholas Ingram was executed in the electric chair.

Supermarket chain Tesco is the UK's largest private employer. (They employ around 330,000 people in 3,146 stores. Of course the coal industry used to employ over 1 million people in 1908, and that figure is down to about 6,000 today.)