ON THIS DAY

1340 Edward III of England declares himself king of France, a claim that leads to the Hundred Years War.

1606 Eight conspirators, including Guy Fawkes, go on trial in London for an attempt to blow up the English Parliament building.

1788 The day after the flag is hoisted at Sydney Cove, parties of troops and convicts unload camping gear for their penal settlement.

1880 American inventor Thomas Edison receives a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.

1901 Death of Giuseppe Verdi, Italian composer of operas such as Rigoletto, La Traviata and Aida.

1934 A shark attacks Wallace John McCutcheon, 15, in the Georges River at East Hills. A friend drags him from the water and he survives serious injuries.

1944 The 872-day siege of Leningrad ends when Soviet troops launch an offensive.

1945 Soviet troops liberate Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.

1967 Three astronauts die in a fire on board their Apollo 1 spacecraft on its launch pad at Cape Kennedy.

1970 James Schlatter receives a patent for “Peptide Sweetening Agents”, an invention that led to the sale of sweetener aspartame.

1972 Peter Pasquale Macari, aka “Mr Brown’’, is sentenced in Sydney to 15 years’ jail while his accomplice, James Poynting, gets seven years. They tried to extort $500,000 from Qantas in a bomb hoax.

1973 The Paris accord ending the Vietnam War, America’s longest war to that time, is signed, providing for an exchange of prisoners and for the unilateral withdrawal of US forces.

2018 Swedish entrepreneur Ingvar Kamprad (above), who founded the home furnishings retailer Ikea, dies at age 91.