Interesting Facts

10th November 2008 - Mama Africa (Miriam Makeba) died of a heart attack after collapsing on stage.

4th November 1783 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Symphony No. 36 was performed for the first time in Linz, Austria. 1839 – The Newport Rising took place, which is the last large-scale armed rebellion against authority on mainland Britain. 1847 – Sir James Young Simpson, a British physician, discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform. 1918 – Wilfred Owen, English soldier and poet died, 6 days before the end of the war. 1922 – British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men found the entrance to Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. 1952 – The United States government established the National Security Agency, or NSA. 1999 - Wallace and Gromit's animated adventure A Grand Day Out was first shown. 2008 – Barack Obama became the first man of African-American descent to be elected President of the United States.

3rd August 2001 - A car bomb exploded in a busy west London street, injuring seven people. 2003 - The Anglican Church in America voted to approve the appointment of an openly gay bishop. 2008 - Nobel literature prize winner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn who revealed the horror of Stalin's camps to the world, died aged 89.

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...

8th July 1949 – Celebrities Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were named in an FBI report as Communist Party members. 1953 – The United States Supreme Court ruled that Washington, D.C. restaurants could not refuse to serve black patrons. 1965 - Ronald Biggs who was serving a 30-year prison sentence for his part in the Great Train Robbery escaped from Wandsworth prison. 1968 – James Earl Ray was arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1984 – Homosexuality was declared legal in the Australia state of New South Wales. 1996 - Three young children and four adults were attacked by a man with a machete at an infant school in Wolverhampton, England. 2001 – Mamoru Takuma stabbed 8 school pupils to death at Ikeda Elementary School. 2003 - Conjoined Iranian twins, Ladan Bijani and Laleh Bijani (in Persian: لادن و لاله بیژنی ), who had volunteered to go ahead with a major operation to separate the...

17th June 1579 – Sir Francis Drake claimed a land he called "Nova Albion" (modern California) for England. 1631 – Mumtaz Mahal died during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, then spent more than 20 years building her tomb, the Taj Mahal. 1882 - Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, was born. 1885 – The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbour aboard the French ship Isere. 1939 – Last public guillotining in France took place. Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, was guillotined in Versailles outside the prison Saint-Pierre. 1940 – The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fell under the occupation of the Soviet Union. 1944 – Iceland declared independence from Denmark and became a republic. 1947 - Pan Am Airways was chartered as the world's first worldwide passenger airline. 1950 - The first documented kidney transplant took place in Chicago, on Ruth Tucker, a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease. Un...

28th May 1503 – James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor were married according to a Papal Bull by Pope Alexander VI. A Treaty of Everlasting Peace between Scotland and England signed on that occasion resulted in a peace that lasted ten years. 1533 – The Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declares the marriage of King Henry VIII of England to Anne Boleyn valid. 1859 – Big Ben was drawn on a carriage pulled by 16 horses from Whitechapel Bell Foundry to the Palace of Westminster. 1934 – The Glyndebourne festival in England was inaugurated. 1937 – Neville Chamberlain became British Prime Minister. 1942 – In retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Nazis in Czechoslovakia killed over 1800 people. 1952 – Women in Greece were given the right to vote. 1959: Two monkeys, Abe and Baker, became the first living creatures to survive a space mission. (Able died from the effects of anesthesia given for removal of implanted electrodes.) 1964 – The Palestine Libe...

30th April 1774 – British settlers massacred family members of Chief Logan, head of the Native American Mingo tribe, at Yellow Creek, Ohio. It sparked off the conflict known as Lord Dunmore's War. 1900 – Casey Jones died in a train wreck in Vaughn, Mississippi, while trying to make up time on the Cannonball Express. 1945 - Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide after being married for one day. 1945 - Soviet soldiers raised the Victory flag over the Reichstag building. 1952 - The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank was published in English. 1975 - The war in Vietnam ended as the government in Saigon announced its unconditional surrender to the Vietcong. 1993 - CERN published a statement that made the technology behind the WWW available on a royalty free basis. 1999 - Two people were killed and at least 30 injured in the third nail-bomb attack in London in two weeks. 2008 – Two skeletal remains found near Ekaterinburg, Russia were confirmed by Russian scient...

5th April 456 - St. Patrick returned to Ireland as a missionary bishop. 1614 - In Virginia, Native American Pocahontas married English colonist John Rolfe. 1621 - The Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, Massachusetts on a return trip to Great Britain. 1722 - The Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen discovered Easter Island. 1904 - The first international rugby league match was played between England and an Other Nationalities team (Welsh & Scottish players) in Central Park, Wigan, England. 1923 - Firestone Tyre and Rubber Company began production of balloon-tyres. 1930 - In an act of civil disobedience, Gandhi broke British law by marching to the sea and making salt. 1955 - Winston Churchill resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom amid indications of failing health. 1956 - Fidel Castro declared himself at war with the President of Cuba. 2008 - Charlton Heston died.

11th January 2008 - Sir Edmund Hillary died. (In 1953, he took part in John Hunt's expedition, in which he and Tenzing became the first to reach the summit. Interestingly there's only a photo of Sherpa Tenzing at the top, Tenzing couldn't take Sir Edmund's photo, but seemingly he didn't mind.)

9th January 2008 - Iwao Takamoto, the US animator who created cartoon dogs Scooby-Doo and Muttley, died aged 81.

29th November 2008 - Playwright, William Gibson died.

According to data from hitched.co.uk, more and more Brits are getting married on a Thursday. (Is this because of tradition, or for religious reasons?  No.  It's because it's cheaper.  Seemingly, tying the knot at weekends can cost thousands of pounds more for the cost of venues, catering and entertainers. Caroline Hendry, editor of hitched.co.uk, said that Thursdays are popular as many venues charge the same high prices on a Friday as they do on the weekend. She added: ‘With many venues and wedding suppliers booking up months or even years in advance, a Thursday wedding can also give couples a better chance of booking their first choice vendors.’ At a time when everyone is struggling with debts and rising house prices, around 21,700 couples chose to marry on a Thursday in 2015 – about 6,000 more than in 2008. According to figures compiled by the Daily Mail, the Achnagairn Estate in the Highlands, where castle hire, including use of the ballroom and a two-night...

Mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani is the first woman to be awarded what is considered the most prestigious prize in math , the Fields medal. (Ms Mirzakhani has been a professor at Stanford University since 2008, but she is also the first person to win this medal from the Middle East, as she was born and raised in Iran. The Fields medal is considered to be the Nobel Prize for maths, because strangely there is no Nobel for mathematics. All 52 previous winners of the award were men.)

According to the UK Payments Council, in the UK, cheques will be phased out by October 2018. (Personal cheque payments reached a peak of 2.4 billion in 1990.  They have fallen steadily since, and only 663 million were written in 2008. So, now they are looking for easy-to-use efficient alternatives that everyone understands.  Cash?)

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.)