Today in history
Today is Thursday, October 31, the 304th day of 2019. There are 61 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1517 — Martin Luther nails 95 theses on the door at Wittenberg Castle church, marking the beginning of the Reformation in Germany.
1731 — The expulsion of Protestants from Salzburg,
Austria, begins.
1841 — The wedding of David Nathan and Rosetta Aarons at Russell is the first recorded Jewish service in New Zealand.
1888 — John Boyd Dunlop patents his pneumatic
bicycle tyre.
1891 — The foundation stone for Selwyn College is
laid.
1895 — The Colonial Bank is sold to the Bank of
New Zealand.
1914 — Russian troops under General Nikolai Ruzsky push the Germans under Hindenburg back to their original positions, ending the battle of the
Vistula River, also known as the Battle of Warsaw.
1917 — In the third battle of Gaza in World War 1, Australian and New Zealand forces (Anzacs) capture Beersheba from the Turks.
1926 — Escapologist Harry Houdini dies in Detroit of gangrene and peritonitis resulting from a ruptured appendix.
1940 — The Battle of Britain in World War 2 is
officially designated to have ended.
1953 — Unimproved rating is introduced in Dunedin.
1956 — US Rear Admiral George Dufek becomes
the first person to land a plane at the South Pole.
1960 — Canterbury University becomes the first tertiary institution in New Zealand to install a highspeed computer, for research purposes.
1961 — A cloud of radioactive debris moves across central Siberia after the Soviet Union exploded a 57megaton hydrogen bomb the previous day, the biggest device ever detonated. The bomb released more than 1500 times the energy of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and 10 times the combined energy of all conventional explosives used in World War 2; Russia’s deStalinisation programme reaches a climax when his body is removed from the mausoleum in Red Square and reburied.
1962 — Balclutha’s new £80,000 War Memorial Hall is officially opened by the Minister of Internal Affairs, F. L. A. Gotz.
1967 — Lieutenantgeneral Nguyen van Thieu takes the oath of office as the first president of South Vietnam’s second republic.
1968 — US President Lyndon Johnson orders a halt
to all US bombing of North Vietnam.
1973 — New Zealand’s first colour television broadcasts are made from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The Government is quick to seize on the revenue potential and acts to introduce a more expensive broadcasting licence for colour television sets.
1984 — India’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, is shot and mortally wounded by her Sikh bodyguards in reprisal for the Indian army attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Sikhism’s holiest shrine, four months earlier.
1985 — Keri Hulme becomes the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize for literature, for her novel The Bone People.
1999 — The All Blacks are eliminated from the
Rugby World Cup when beaten 4331 by France at Twickenham in a semifinal match; an Egypt Air Boeing 767 goes down in the Atlantic Ocean off the Massachusetts island of Nantucket on a flight from New York to Cairo with 217 people on board.
2000 — A Russian rocket carrying the first residents of the international space station blasts off from Kazakhstan.
2011 — The world population reaches 7 billion.
Today’s birthdays:
Anthony Wilding, New Zealand tennis player (18831915); John A. Lee, New Zealand politician (18911982); Frank Bateson, New Zealand astronomer (19092007); Roy Calvert, distinguished officer in Royal New Zealand Air Force during World War 2 (19132002); Evan (Rosie) Mackie, New Zealand fighter pilot during World War 2 (191786);
Sir Thomas Gault, New Zealand jurist (19382015); Sally Kirkland, US actress (1941); Peter Jackson, New Zealand film director (1961); Rob Schneider, US actor/comedian (1963); Mike O’Malley, US actor (1966); Clayton Cosgrove, New Zealand politician (1969); Linn Berggren, Swedish pop singer (1970); Phil Tataurangi, New Zealand golfer (1971);
Gareth Hughes, New Zealand politician (1981);
Liana BarrettChase, New Zealand netball international (1984).
Quote of the day:
‘‘If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.’’ — American poet Natalie Clifford Barney, who was born on this day in 1876. She died in 1972, aged 95.
ODT and agencies