TODAY IN HISTORY

515 The Archbishop of York, Thomas Wolsey, is invested as a cardinal.

1887 The Kogarah-Sandringham Tramway opens. It travels past the popular waterside pleasure grounds of Sans Souci.

1919 Jules Archibald dies in Sydney at 63. He co-founded the Bulletin magazine and his bequest funded the Archibald Prize for portraits.

1928 Charles Kingsford Smith and three other crew take off from Richmond in Sydney in the Southern Cross for the first nonstop flight from Australia to New Zealand.

1929 Stanley Bruce’s coalition government falls when backbencher and former prime minister Billy Hughes crosses the floor with five supporters to vote against a motion to expedite the Maritime Industries Bill.

1962 Rod Laver, 24, wins the Grand Slam in men’s tennis by defeating fellow Australian Roy Emerson in the US Championships in New York. 1977 In Marseilles, Tunisian migrant and convicted murderer Hamida Djandoubi becomes the last person to be executed by guillotine in France.

1994 A small stand of Wollemi pines, a species of tree surviving from 200 million years ago, previously only known from fossils, is discovered in a sandstone gorge about 150km northwest of Sydney.

2008 The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, is powered up for the first time. 2019British Prime Minister Boris Johnson prorogues parliament in an attempt to stop it voting to extend the deadline for Britain’s exit from the EU.