April 22 in History

Earth Day — First celebrated in 1970, this year’s theme is End Plastic Pollution.

1370 — The first stone of the Bastille — intended as a fortification to help protect the wall around Paris against English attacks during the Hundred Years’ War — is laid by order of King Charles V. Charles VI turns it into a fortress and it becomes a prison in the 17th century. Following the storming of the Bastille on July 14 1789, it is destroyed.

1833 — Richard Trevithick, 62, British engineer who built the first steam locomotive in 1804, dies in Kent.

1870 — Vladimir Lenin, first communist leader of USSR, is born in Simbirsk.

1904 — Julius Robert Oppenheimer, physicist and director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designs and builds the first atomic bombs for the Manhattan Project, is born in NYC.

1936 — Glen Campbell, country singer (“Rhinestone Cowboy”), is born in Arkansas.

1937 — Jack Nicholson, actor (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” , is born in New Jersey.

1945 — Adolf Hitler acknowledges that the war (World War 2) is lost and the Third Reich a failure. During a three-hour military conference in the Führerbunker, he lets loose a shrieking denunciation of the German Army and the “universal treason, corruption, lies and failures” of all those who had let him down.

1992 — In Guadalajara, Mexico, more than 250 people are killed by 10 gasoline explosions in the sewer system and fires over four hours that destroy 8km of streets. Many estimate at least 1 000 deaths. About 500-600 people are missing. Four days before the explosion, city workers found dangerously high levels of gasoline fumes but the mayor did not feel it was necessary to evacuate the city.

1994 — Richard Nixon, 81, 37th president of the US, dies in NYC.

2001 — Hasim Rahman stops Lennox Lewis in the fifth round to capture the WBC, IBF, IBO and Lineal heavyweight titles at Carnival City in one of the biggest upsets in boxing history.

2007 — Mritak Sangh (Association of the Dead), a small political party in India’s Uttar Pradesh state, pushes for the reinstatement of the legal rights of people declared dead by unscrupulous relatives trying to steal their assets. The party’s founder Lal Bihari, now 62, was declared dead in 1975 by his uncle who took over his property. He was declared alive again in 1994. He says at least 40 000 people face this problem in Uttar Pradesh.