Today in History

1592 – ‘‘Ultimate Pi Day’’: on this day at 6.53am is the largest correspondence between calendar dates and significant digits of pi, since the introduction of the Julian calendar (3.14159265358).

1794 – Eli Whitney receives a patent for his cotton gin, which revolutionises the cotton industry.

1883 – Death of German philosopher and economist Karl Marx, right, in London.

1889 – Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents his ‘‘navigable balloon’’.

1913 – John D Rockefeller gives US$100 million to the Rockefeller Foundation.

1923 – Warren Harding becomes the first US president to pay taxes.

1924 – John ‘‘Jack’’ Mack, who co-founded Mack Trucks – then known as the Mack Brothers Company – is killed when his car collides with a streetcar in Pennsylvania.

1943 – In World War II the Krakow Ghetto is ‘‘liquidated’’ by the SS and police authorities.

1945 – The heaviest bomb of World War II, the 9988-kilogram Grand Slam, is dropped by the RAF’s Dambuster Squadron on Germany’s Bielefeld railway viaduct.

1950 – The FBI introduces its ‘‘10 Most Wanted Fugitives’’ list.

1958 – South Africa’s government bans the African National Congress.

1964 – Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby is sentenced to death for murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F Kennedy.

1973 – Future US senator John McCain is freed after more than five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp.

1978 – Dutch marines free 71 hostages held by South Moluccans for 29 hours in a government building in Essen, the Netherlands.

1980 – Split Enz have their first New Zealand

No 1 with I Got You. It also topped the charts in Australia and Canada.

1990 – The congress of People’s Deputies elects Mikhail Gorbachev as the new president of the Soviet Union.

1991 – The Birmingham Six, Irishmen wrongly convicted of the 1974 bombing of pubs in England, are freed after 16 years in jail.

1998 – India’s Congress party appoints as its president Sonia Gandhi, the widow of assassinated prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. 2013 – National People’s Congress confirms Xi Jinping as the new president of China.

2015 – Australia prepares to send emergency response teams to Vanuatu, after Cyclone Pam wreaked devastation on the island nation.

Birthdays

Victor Emmanuel II, first king of modern Italy (1820-78); Albert Einstein, German-born physicist (1879-1955); Michael Caine, UK actor (1933-); Quincy Jones, US record producer (1933-); Sir Bob Charles, NZ golfer (1936-); Billy Crystal, US actor-comedian (1948-); Prince Albert of Monaco (1958-); Sarah Ulmer, NZ cyclist (1976-).