This Week In History
1884: George Eastman obtained a patent for flexible photographic film able to be rolled up in a canister
2004: Prince Norodom Sihamoni, a former ballet dancer, succeeded his father, Norodom Sihanouk, as King of Cambodia
2004: Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao demarcated the 4,345km (2,700-mile) border between Russia and China
2017: A truck bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia, killed over 500 people
1492: Christopher Columbus made the first recorded reference to tobacco – leaves being smoked
1999: The French humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontieres was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
2003: Yang Liwei, the first Chinese astronaut, orbited the Earth 14 times in his Shenzhou 5 spacecraft
2010: The Gotthard Base Tunnel in the Swiss Alps became the world’s longest railway tunnel
1793: Queen Marie Antoinette of France was guillotined for treason during the French Revolution
1893: The song Happy Birthday to You was published as a classroom greeting, Good Morning to All
1923: John Harwood patented the self-winding wrist watch
1989: A decline in the African elephant population led the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species to ban all trading in ivory
1906: Arthur Korn sent the first long distance picture by telegraph, paving the way for their use in newspapers
1908: French scientists discovered a way to produce the first successful vaccine against tuberculosis
1973: OPEC oil producers hiked the price of oil in response to US support of Israel in the Yom Kippur war
2003: The Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan became the world’s tallest building, later surpassed by Dubai’s Burj Khalifa
1916: The Trans-Siberian Railway from Moscow to Vladivostok was completed. Construction began in 1891
1955: The first antiprotons, a new atomic sub-particle, were detected
1963: France launched the first cat into space. Felix was retrieved live after a parachute descent 1998: The first of 2,000 international observers arrived in the province of Kosovo to monitor the withdrawal of Serbian troops
1856: The first efficient working prototype of the internal combustion engine was produced in Florence, Italy 1863: Alfred Nobel was granted his first patent, for the preparation of the explosive nitroglycerin
1943: Streptomycin, the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis, was isolated by a graduate student in the United States
1983: The US Senate passed a bill making Martin Luther King’s birthday a public holiday
1818: The 49th parallel became the boundary between the US and Canada
1935: Mao Zedong and his Communist forces ended their Long March at Yan’an, in northwest China, a year after fleeing Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang armies in the south
1983: A metre was redefined as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second 2011: Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was killed by revolutionary forces