Today in history
Today is Saturday, May 16, the 137th day of 2020. There are 229 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1568 — Mary, Queen of Scots, takes refuge in
England.
1770 — Marie Antoinette, aged 14, is married to France’s King Louis XVI, aged 15.
1840 — The Rev J. Watkins lands at Waikouaiti, becoming the first missionary in Otago.
1842 — Land claims commissioner William Spain oversees New Zealand’s first landcourt hearing, in Wellington.
1846 — Six soldiers and two European civilians are killed in an attack on Boulcott Farm in the Hutt Valley. Disagreements over the validity of land purchases by the New Zealand Company led to a series of skirmishes between Maori and Government forces in the Wellington region between 1845 and August 1846.
1862 — The mastermind of the organised colonisation of New Zealand, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, dies, aged 66.
1868 — The United States Senate fails by one vote to achieve the twothirds majority guilty vote required to convict President Andrew Johnson in his Senate impeachment trial.
1881 — The first electric tram goes into public service, near Berlin in Germany.
1883 — The first regular direct steam link between Britain and New Zealand begins with the arrival of the Westmeath in Auckland.
1888 — Emile Berliner gives the first demonstration of flatdisc recording and reproduction (technology that would replace Edison’s cylinders) before the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
1920 — Joan of Arc is formally canonised as a saint by Pope Benedict XV in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. This concluded a process began by an 1869 petition.
1943 — Operation Chastise takes place in World War 2, when British Lancaster aircraft from the 617 Squadron bomb the Mohne and the Eder dams in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Basin using bouncing bombs, in what has become known as the Dam Busters Raid.
1960 — The Big Four summit conference in Paris collapses on its opening day as the Soviet Union levels spying charges against the US following a U2 spyplane incident.
1961 — Majorgeneral Park Chunghee stages a
military coup in South Korea.
1975 — Japanese climber Junko Tabei becomes the first woman to reach the summit of Mt Everest.
1981 — The New Zealand football team’s 20 victory over Australia, in Sydney, signals a defining moment in its qualifying campaign for the 1982 World Cup finals.
1982 — New Zealand plays its first international football match in Dunedin in 35 years: the League of Ireland defeating the All Whites 21. It was New Zealand’s only loss in a fivematch series.
1986 — Members of the military junta which led Argentina to defeat in the 1982 Falklands War with Britain are sentenced to between eight and 14 years’ imprisonment and stripped of their ranks. Former president Leopoldo Galtieri is sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment.
1991 — Queen Elizabeth II becomes the first
British monarch to address the US Congress.
1994 — Scotland Yard for the first time approves a plan to allow some London police officers to openly carry firearms.
2013 — Scientists at the Oregon Health and
Science University report that they have successfully reprogrammed human skin cells back to an embryonic state. The purpose of their study was not to generate human clones, but to produce lines of embryonic stem cells.
Today’s birthdays:
Peter Hall, New Zealand flying ace in World War 2 (19222010); Roy Kerr, New Zealand mathematician (1934); Paul Ackerley, New Zealand Olympic hockey gold medallist (19492011); Pierce Brosnan, Irish actor (1953); Debra Winger , US actress (1955); Mare Winningham, US actress (1959); Janet Jackson, US pop singer (1966); Matthew Hart, New Zealand cricketer (1972); Tori Spelling, US actress (1973); Melanie Lynskey, New Zealand actress (1977); Jonathan Duncan, New Zealand swimmer (1982); Megan Fox, US actress/model (1986).
Quote of the day: