TODAY IN HISTORY: B.C. civil servants walk out

In 1623, Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare, died.

In 1806, the Holy Roman Empire came to an end when King Francis II abdicated. Founded in 962 by Otto I of Germany, the Empire was a political entity in west and central Europe, made up primarily of German states, over which the Pope had spiritual control. The empire ended under pressure from Napoleon Bonaparte through the Confederation of the Rhine, a league of German principalities which renounced allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire.

In 1812, an armistice to end the War of 1812 was signed by the governor of British North America and an American general. But it was later revoked by the U.S. Congress, and the war continued for two more years.

In 1866, an imperial statute united Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland as a single Crown colony. The island had been granted to the Hudson’s Bay Co. and became a colony in 1850.

In 1890, the electric chair was used for the first time as murderer William Kemmler was executed in Auburn, N.Y.

In 1914, Serbia declared war on Germany.

In 1915, the British landed troops at Gallipoli in an effort to dislodge the Turks on the peninsula in northwest Turkey.

In 1926, Gertrude Ederle of the United States became the first woman to swim the English Channel, arriving in Kingsdown, England, from France in 14-and-a-half hours.

In 1926, Warner Brothers premiered its Vitaphone sound-on-disk movie system at a gala in New York.

In 1932, the modern Welland Canal, one of the world's busiest inland waterways, was officially opened. The canal links Lake Ontario to Lake Erie by a series of locks cutting across the Niagara Peninsula. It is one of the principal sections of the St. Lawrence Seaway, which allows ships access to the interior of North America from the Atlantic. The first Welland Canal opened almost 100 years earlier, in 1829.

In 1942, the Allied invasion of North Africa was launched during the Second World War.

In 1945, the American B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” dropped a four-tonne atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The city was engulfed by clouds of radioactivity generated by the bomb, innocently nicknamed “Little Boy.” An estimated 140,000 people were killed and 50,000 buildings destroyed.

In 1954, one of the Dionne quintuplets, Emilie, 20, died at Ste. Agathe des Monts, Que., of suffocation during an epileptic attack.

In 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov became the first man to orbit the Earth more than once when he made 17 orbits in "Vostok 2."

In 1962, Jamaica became an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth.

In 1969, most of the windows in an eight-block area of Kelowna were smashed when a U.S. navy jet broke the sound barrier. Washington agreed to pay damages.

In 1978, Pope Paul VI died of a heart attack at the age of 80. He had led the Roman Catholic Church for 15 years.

In 1980, hurricane Allen hit Jamaica, leaving a trail of destroyed crops and 68 dead in the Caribbean.

In 1982, the first provincewide walkout of civil servants in British Columbia began. More than 30,000 of the 40,000 members of the B.C. Government Employees Union left their jobs after rejecting a government offer of a 6.5 per cent pay increase. But they shortly agreed to return to work while negotiations resumed.

In 1983, the Spanish supertanker Castillo de Bellver broke up off the coast of South Africa, spilling 60 million litres of oil.