ON THIS DAY
241BC Romans sink half the Carthaginian fleet as the First Punic War nears its end.
1629 King Charles I dissolves England’s parliament and rules without it, starting his “11-year tyranny”.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call, calling his assistant, Thomas Watson, in an adjoining room in Boston
1902 WA chief engineer Charles O’Connor shoots himself dead after criticism of his goldfields water supply. The huge system is finished later that year; it works perfectly.
1908 Australians T.W. Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson, of Ernest Shackleton’s British Antarctic expedition, ascend Mt Erebus, the only active volcano in Antarctica.
1933 Soon after Adolf Hitler became chancellor, the first concentration camp in Germany opens at Dachau, where at least 32,000 people would die from disease, malnutrition, physical oppression, and execution.
1952 Fulgencio Batista overthrows the corrupt Cuban government. He is even more corrupt and brutal, until he is overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959.
1965 The first birthday lottery for 20-yearolds to choose conscripts for two years’ national service is held in Melbourne; 96 marbles marked with dates are drawn from 181 in a Tattersall’s barrel.
1969 James Earl Ray (above) pleads guilty to murdering American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., and is sentenced to 99 years in prison.
2006 NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter enters Mars orbit and began searching for signs of water on the planet.
2008 Catholic brother Ross Francis Murrin, 52, is jailed for 18 months for molesting eight students at Marist Brothers’ school, Daceyville, in southeast Sydney, in the 1970s.