TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Wednesday, February 10, the 41st day of 2021. There are 324 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1777 — Captain Cook arrives for a third visit to New Zealand.
1908 — Auckland gets its first public supply of electricity, 20 years after Wellington, via a steampowered generator run in conjunction with the city’s destructor at Freemans Bay.
1940 — The Soviet Union begins mass deportations of Polish citizens from occupied eastern Poland to Siberia; the first onereel animated short Tom and Jerry cartoon Puss
Gets the Boot, is released in the US.
1942 — Glenn Miller receives the first gold disc for selling one million copies of Chattan
ooga Choo Choo. 1958 — The Queen Mother visits Dunedin.
1962 — The Soviet Union exchanges captured American U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolph Ivanovich Abel, a Soviet spy held by the US; American pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibition opens at the Leo Castelli Gallery, in New York. It included
Look Mickey and featured his first employment of BenDay dots, speech balloons and comic imagery sourcing.
1964 — Aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne collides with and sinks destroyer HMAS
Voyager off the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, killing 82 on Voyager.
1967 — The New Zealand government announces an end to subsidies on flour and butter. On the same day, the last delivery of free milk in schools, which began 30 years earlier, takes place.
1984 — Kenyan soldiers kill an estimated 5000 ethnic Somali Kenyans in the Wagalla massacre.
1985 — New Zealand’s major trading banks operate a pilot scheme for eftpos through 19 Auckland petrol stations. Despite problems with its acceptance, eftpos eventually becomes a permanent and vital method of financial transactions in New Zealand.
1989 — Ron Brown is elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, becoming the first African American to lead a major US political party.
1990 — South African president F.W. de Klerk announces that black activist Nelson Mandela will be released after 27 years in captivity.
1992 — Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson is convicted in Indianapolis of raping Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant.
1994 — The worst of the Bosnian War is over for the battered city of Sarajevo, where a UNbrokered ceasefire goes into effect.
1996 — An IBM computer called Deep Blue makes chess history by beating Garry Kasparov, in the first game of the sixgame match, the first time a chessplaying computer has beaten a reigning world champion under chess tournament rules.
1997 — A civil jury heaps $US25 million in punitive damages on O.J. Simpson for the slayings of his exwife and her friend.
2001 — The International Space Station becomes the largest structure in space with the addition of the $US1.4 billion science module
Destiny.
2002 — The last Southerner passenger train service travels to Christchurch.
2005 — Prince Charles announces his engagement to Camilla Parker Bowles.
2009 — US and Russian communication satellites collide (in the first crash of its kind) in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds.
2013 — During the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela, a stampede breaks out at the train station in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, India, leading to the deaths of 42 people and injuring about 45 others.