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...

25th July 1943 - Italian dictator Benito Mussolini stepped down as head of the armed forces and the government. 1969 - Senator Edward Kennedy plead guilty to leaving the scene of a crime following the Chappaquiddick car crash. 1978 - The first so called 'test tube baby' was born in Manchester, England. 1992 - The Olympic Games opened in Barcelona with all countries present for the first time in modern history. 2000 - 113 people died when Concorde crashed minutes after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris. Concorde was out of service for more than a year after the Paris crash, it struggled to attract enough passengers and was retired in October 2003 as it was no longer profitable.

21st July 365 – A tsunami devestated the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The tsunami was caused by an earthquake estimated to be 8.0 on the Richter Scale. 5,000 people perished in the Alexandria, and 45,000 more died outside of the city. 1403 – King Henry IV of England defeated rebels to the north of the county town of Shropshire, England. 1545 – French troops landed on the coast of the Isle of Wight. 1904 – Louis Rigolly, a Frenchman, became the first man to break the 100mph barrier on land. He drove a 15-liter Gobron-Brille in Ostend, Belgium. 1925 – In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100. 1925 – Sir Malcolm Campbell became the first man to break the 150mph land barrier at Pendine Sands in Wales. He drove a Sunbeam to a two-way average of 150.33mph. 1969 – Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first men to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission. 1972 – Th...

1968 – The Special Olympics was founded. 1969 - Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr. became the first humans to land on the Moon, while Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, orbited above. 1974 - Thousands of Turkish troops invaded northern Cyprus. 1982 – The Provisional IRA detonated two bombs in Hyde Park and Regents Park in central London, killing eight soldiers on ceremonial duty, wounding forty-seven bystanders, and leading to the deaths of seven horses. 1986 – In South Africa, police fired tear gas into a church service for families of those held under the government's emergency decrees. 1989 – Burma's ruling junta put opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest. 1990 - An IRA bomb blew a 10-foot hole in the London Stock Exchange. 1996 – In Spain, an ETA bomb at an airport killed 35. 1998 – Two hundred aid workers from CARE International, Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups l...

7th July 1543 – French troops invade Luxembourg. 1947 – The Roswell UFO incident took place. 1967 – The civil war in Biafra began. 1969 – In Canada, the Official Languages Act was adopted making the French language equal to the English language throughout the Federal government. 1978 – The Solomon Islands became independent from the United Kingdom. 2005 - Four bombs were set off on the London public transport system during the morning rush hour, killing 56 people, and injuring 700. It was the deadliest single act of terrorism in the UK since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, which killed 270 people. A group called "Al Qaeda in Europe" claimed responsibility for the attacks. 2006 – The Western Black Rhinoceros, the rarest of the Black Rhino subspecies, was declared extinct by the World Conservation Union, due to poaching.

3rd July 1844 – The last nesting pair of Great Auks was killed. They were found incubating an egg off Iceland. Jón Brandsson and Sigurður Ísleifsson strangled the adults and Ketill Ketilsson smashed the egg with his boot. 1884 – The Dow Jones published its 1st stock average. 1928 - The first colour television transmission took place in London. 1969 - Former Rolling Stones guitarist, Brian Jones (born Lewis Brian Hopkin-Jones) drowned. 1971 - Jim Morrison, the lead singer of American rock group The Doors, was found dead in a bathtub in Paris of heart failure. He was only 27. 1976 - Israeli commandos rescued 103 hostages held by Arab militants at Entebbe airport, Uganda. 1987 - Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was sentenced to life imprisonment at a court in Lyon. 1988 - Missiles fired from an American naval warship, the USS Vincennes, brought down an Iranian passenger jet in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people aboard. 1996 – The Stone of Scone was returned to S...

9th April 1413 – Henry V was crowned King of England. 1483 – King Edward IV of England died. 1413 – Henry V is crowned King of England. 1626 – Francis Bacon died. 1860 – Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created the oldest known recording of an audible human voice. 1940 – Vidkun Quisling seized power in Norway. 1967 – The first Boeing 737 made its maiden flight. 1969 – The first British-built Concorde made its maiden flight from Filton to RAF Fairford. 2005 – Charles, Prince of Wales married Camilla Parker Bowles.

25th March 1306 - Robert the Bruce became King of Scotland. 1807 - The Slave Trade Act "An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade" was signed. It made slave trading illegal throughout the British Empire. "Slavery is still practised in new forms that today affect millions of men, women and children across the world." Koichiro Matsuura 1957 - The European Economic Community was established. The members were West Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. 1969 - During their honeymoon, John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their first Bed-In for Peace in the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel. 1975 - King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot and killed at his palace in Riyadh, by his mentally ill nephew. March 25th also used to be the start of the new year in England, Wales, Ireland, and the future United States until the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. (The year 1751 began on 25 March; the year 1752 began on 1 January.)

12th November 1439 – Plymouth, England, became the first town incorporated by the English Parliament. 1793 – Jean Sylvain Bailly, the first Mayor of Paris, was guillotined. 1893 – The treaty of the Durand Line delineating the border between present day Pakistan and Afghanistan was signed by Sir Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat in British India. 1912 – The frozen bodies of Robert Scott and his men were found on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. 1918 – Austria became a republic. 1927 – Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union. 1933 – Hugh Gray took the first known photographs alleged to be of the Loch Ness Monster. 1956 – Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia joined the United Nations. 1956 – 111 people, including 103 refugees, were killed by the Israeli army in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah, in the midst of the Suez Crisis. The United Nations were unable to determine the circumstances surrounding...

In 1969 Buzz Aldrin claimed $33.31 in travel expenses. What for? His trip to the moon! #TBT My mission director @Buzzs_xtina 's favorite piece of my memorabilia. My travel voucher to the moon. #Apollo11 pic.twitter.com/c89UyOfvgY — Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) July 30, 2015

Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin spent a total of 21 hours on the Moon, two-and-a-half of them outside the landing module.  They left a plaque, which read, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind." " Neil Armstrong pose ".  via  Wikimedia Commons . (The astronauts, including Michael Collins, returned to Earth on 24th July, where they spent the next 21 days in quarantine at an American military base - a procedure dropped in subsequent missions since no alien organisms were found.)

Fizzy drinks are on average, 5,000 times more acidic than water, which has a neutral pH level. (This is having a disastrous affect on people's teeth. A normal sized can of pop contains approximately nine teaspoons of sugar, and regular consumption of these sugary drinks increases the risk of tooth decay by over 200%. According to dentists, who are at the front line of the battle against tooth decay, if you drink a lot of canned or bottled fizzy pop, you might as well stick your teeth in an acid bath. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 1969 Australians used to drink about 47 litres per person in a year, in 2012 it was estimated to be over 100 litres, and rising. That's almost 300 cans a year! Australian peridontist, Dr Amis Lidums, said "Teeth initially become quite sensitive and they'll start to become shorter as the protective enamel over the surface of the teeth disappears." Almost 60 per cent of children aged five to sixteen consume ...

According to research led by the University of Zurich's Dr Vladeta Ajdacic-Gross, you are 14% more likely to die on your birthday than on any other day of the year. (The research analysed data from 2.5 million deaths in Switzerland between 1969 and 2008, and it doesn't seem to matter what age you are, or what sex. The researchers put it nicely, "birthdays… appear to end up in a lethal way more frequently than expected ." Chillingly Professor David Spiegelhalter, a statistician from Cambridge University, says " It's purely a birthday effect." So, if it's your birthday today... Be careful out there.)