TODAY IN HISTORY

SATURDAY, AUGUST 25, 2018

THIS DAY IN HISTORY

1609 – Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

1828 - Explorer Allan Cunningham discovers Cunningham’s Gap.

1835 – The first Great Moon Hoax article is published in The New York Sun, announcing the discovery of life and civilization on the Moon.

1853 - Francis Cadell launches Australia’s first paddlesteamer – the ‘Lady Augusta’ from Goolwa.

1894 – Kitasato Shibasabur discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.

1909 - Long Bay Gaol in Sydney is opened.

1914 – World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts are lost.

1914 – World War I: Japan declares war on Austria-Hungary.

1939 – Britain promises to defend Poland in case of invasion by a foreign power.

1940 – World War II: The first Bombing of Berlin by the British Royal Air Force.

1942 – World War II: Second day of the Battle of the Eastern Solomons; a Japanese Navy transport convoy headed towards Guadalcanal is turned back by an Allied air attack.

1944 – World War II: The Allies liberate Paris after four years of German occupation.

1950 – President Harry Truman orders the U.S. Army to seize control of the nation’s railways to avert a strike.

1981 – Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Saturn.

1989 - Voyager 2 spacecraft transmits the first ever pictures of Neptune.

2012 – Voyager 1 spacecraft enters interstellar space - the first human-made object to do so.

2017 – Hurricane Harvey makes landfall in Texas as a Category 4 hurricane, causing catastrophic flooding, killing 106 people and causing $125 billion in damage.