TODAY IN HISTORY: Lightning cloud kills 2,100

In 1711, the first running at Britain’s famous Ascot horse track was held. Ascot was founded by Queen Anne after she came across a natural clearing while out riding near the village of East Cote, now called Ascot. Anne ordered a course should be laid out at the site for horses to gallop at full stretch.

In 1767, England held its last burning at the stake.

In 1772, a mysterious cloud, charged with lightning, lashed the island of Java, killing 2,100 people.

In 1862, Sarah Bernhardt made her acting debut in Jean Racine’s “Iphigenie.”

In 1877, the first moons of the planet Mars were discovered by American scientist Asaph Hall.

In 1884, the boundary between Ontario and Manitoba was settled — but wasn’t implemented until 1889.

In 1906, Eugene Lauste patented a soundon-film process.

In 1906, Montreal recorded its first automobile fatality.

In 1909, the first recorded use of the “SOS” distress signal in North America was by the steamship “SS Arapahoe,” which had broken down off North Carolina’s Cape Hatteras.

In 1919, American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie died of pneumonia at age 83. Carnegie invested his savings in oil lands and in what became the biggest iron and steel works in the United States. After his retirement, he donated $350 million to establish such philanthropic organizations as the Carnegie Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as over 2,500 libraries throughout the United States, Canada and Britain.

In 1934, the first federal prisoners arrived at the island prison Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.

In 1956, abstract painter Jackson Pollock, 44, died in an automobile accident on Long Island, N.Y.

In 1960, the Medical Research Council of

Canada was established.

In 1965, rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles after white police officers arrested a black man suspected of drunk driving. More than 30 people were killed and hundreds injured in the week that followed.

In 1987, Clara Peller, the elderly woman in the “Where’s the beef?” commercials for Wendy’s, died at age 86.

In 2000, Walt Disney Co. was ordered to pay an Ontario-based architect and a retired baseball umpire $240 million for stealing an idea for a sports-oriented theme park in Florida.

In 2002, Canadian actor Jason Priestly was seriously injured after crashing a race car head-on into a wall in Sparta, Ky. He broke his back, his nose and both feet.

In 2014, Robin Williams, the Academy Awardwinning actor and comic superstar, committed suicide at his home in the San Francisco Bay area. He was 63. His wife later revealed he was in the early stages of Parkinson’s.