Interesting Facts

20th June 451 – Flavius Aetius' defeated Attila the Hun. 1214 – The University of Oxford received its charter. 1631 – The Irish village of Baltimore was attacked by Algerian pirates. 1685 – James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth declared himself King of England at Bridgwater. 1756 – A British garrison was imprisoned in the Black Hole of Calcutta. 1782 – The U.S. Congress adopted the Great Seal of the United States. 1791 – King Louis XVI of France and his immediate family began the Flight to Varennes during The French Revolution. 1837 – Queen Victoria succeeded to the British throne. 1840 – Samuel Morse received the patent for the telegraph. 1976 - Hundreds of Americans and Britons were moved from Beirut and taken to safety in Syria by the US military, following the murder of the US ambassador. 1979 – ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart was shot dead by a Nicaraguan soldier under the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The murder was caught on tape and sparked inte...

27th April 1124 – David I became King of Scotland. 1296 – The Scots were defeated by Edward I of England at the Battle of Dunbar. 1667 – The blind and impoverished John Milton sold the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10. 1773 – The Parliament of Great Britain passed the Tea Act, designed to save the British East India Company by granting it a monopoly on the North American tea trade. They were not a Fair Trade company. 1791 - Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the Morse code, was born. 1840 – The foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, was laid. 1992 – Betty Boothroyd became the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history.

The text of Samuel Morse's first telegram to his partner Alfred Vail, was "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?" (Western Union - which for a century and a half brought news of joy, sorrow and success in distinctive, hand-delivered, yellow envelopes - has ceased its telegram service.)