This Week In History
April 22, 1952
An atomic test was broadcast live on US national television for the first time. The 31-kiloton bomb was dropped from a B-50 plane over the Nevada desert
1760: John Joseph Merlin, a Belgian inventor, wore the first known pair of roller skates at a party in London 1889: Oklahoma’s famous land rush began as around 50,000 would-be settlers raced into the territory
1977: Optical fibre was first used for live telephone traffic, revolutionising the telecommunications industry 2003: Russia’s Yukos Oil purchased its rival Sibneft to become the world’s fifth largest public oil company
April 23, 303BC
According to legend, Saint George, a Roman soldier of Syrian origin, died by order of the Roman emperor Diocletian for failing to recant his Christian faith
1516: A regulation in Bavaria specified that beer should be brewed with only three ingredients, water, malt and hops 1992: A NASA satellite found evidence of wispy clouds of matter at the edge of the known universe
2003: Palestinian president Yasser Arafat and prospective prime minister Mahmoud Abbas agreed a new cabinet after a 10-day stalemate 2003: Checkpoints in Nicosia were opened for the first time since 1974
April 24, 2006
Panama unveiled a US $5bil plan to expand the Panama Canal to cope with ships up to 50 percent wider than those then able to pass through the ageing waterway
1923: Sigmund Freud published his fundamental paper about the Ego and the Id, concepts used in psychoanalysis
2001: An unmanned spy plane completed the first non-stop, robotic flight across the Pacific
2005: Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, was installed as the 265th pontiff 2008: Nepal’s Communist Party overwhelmingly won the country’s general election
April 25, 1918
Ella Fitzgerald, US jazz singer, was born. As well as her solo career she often collaborated with the bands of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Count Basie
1915: Allied troops launched the disastrous Gallipoli campaign against Turkish forces during WWI
1976: Elections took place in Vietnam for a National Assembly to reunite the two halves of the country
1993: Pope John Paul II began a visit to Albania, which until only a few years earlier had been the world’s only officially atheist state 2015: A magnitude 7.8 earthquake killed over 8,000 people in Nepal
April 26, 2017
China launched the 001A, its first domestically built aircraft carrier, as regional tensions grew over Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea
1803: Thousands of fragments fell from the skies over L’Aigle, France, thus confirming the existence of meteors 1986: An explosion at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine spread a radioactive cloud over Europe
1994: The first non-racial general election got underway in South Africa
2008: Austrian police arrested Josef Fritzl, who incarcerated his daughter in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children by her
April 27, 1993
Eritrea declared independence from Ethiopia following a UN monitored referendum in which 99.83% voted in favour. The poll followed a 30-year civil war
1880: The first electronic hearing aid for the deaf was patented 1981: Xerox PARC introduced the first computer mouse incorporated in a commercially available system
2001: Scientists revealed how rising thermal plumes in Earth’s mantle drive tectonic plates, causing earthquakes 2007: Estonia became the first nation to suffer a major cyber-attack when unprecedented Internet activity took down many banks and goverment sites
April 28, 1789
Fletcher Christian led a mutiny aboard the British navy ship HMS Bounty. Captain William Bligh and other non-mutineers were cast adrift in a small boat in the Pacific 1253: The mantra Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, central to Nichiren Buddhism, was propounded for the first time 2005: An ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to have been extinct since 1944, was seen in a US wildlife refuge
2006: The vast Thera eruption which destroyed Crete’s Minoan civilization was dated to between 1627-1600BC 2008: Mars agreed to buy Wrigley, the chewing gum maker, creating the world’s biggest candy company