ON THIS DAY
1912:
William Booth, English social reformer, evangelist and founder of the Salvation Army, died aged 83.
1913:
Harry Brearley of Sheffield cast the first stainless steel.
1913:
Adolphe Pegond baled out from a Bleriot airplane 700 feet above Buc in France. His parachute brought him down safely, making him the first to parachute from a plane.
1924:
British sprinter Eric Liddell refused to run in the heat of the 100m at the Paris Olympics because it fell on a Sunday and was against his religious convictions. He had been tipped as the likely winner.
1956:
Calder Hall, in Cumbria, the world’s first large-scale atomic power station, began generating.
1968:
Russia sent tanks into Czechoslovakia.
1977:
The Voyager I spacecraft was launched on its journey via Jupiter and Saturn to become the first man-made object to leave the Solar System.
1989:
The Thames pleasure cruiser Marchioness was hit by a dredger and 51 young people attending a party on the boat were killed.
1989:
George Adamson, British naturalist and conservationist, best known for his work with his wife Joy and the lioness Elsa, was murdered by bandits in a game park in Kenya.
2009:
Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was allowed to return to Tripoli on compassionate grounds as he had been diagnosed with cancer and given three months to live. He was serving a life sentence for the murder of 270 people in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 in December 1988.