NOW & THEN
27 JANUARY
1778: Joseph Bramah patented the valved flush lavatory.
1879: Thomas Edison patented his electric lamp.
1913: Jim Thorpe, after crushing victories at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, was stripped of his decathlon and pentathlon gold medals by the Olympic Committee following revelations that he was a “professional”.
1926: John Logie Baird, the Scottish inventor, gave his first public demonstration of “true television” to members of the Royal Institution in his workshop in Soho, London.
1948: The United States/ Japanese Antarctic Whaling Expedition landed an 89ft female blue whale on its ship Hashidate Maru. It had to be weighed piecemeal and tipped the scales at 134 tons.
1964: France established diplomatic relations with China.
1967: United States, Soviet Union and 60 other nations signed treaty to limit military activities in outer space.
1967: Fire broke out aboard the spaceship Apollo 1 during the ground test at Cape Kennedy, killing Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.
1967: Round-the-world yachtsman Francis Chichester was knighted by the Queen on the quay at Greenwich. The sword that touched his shoulders was that of Sir Francis Drake.
1973: The United States signed a ceasefire to end its military action in Vietnam.
1987: President Mikhail Gorbachev unveiled reform programme for Soviet Communist Party including secret ballots to elect party officials.
1989: Ariane-2 rocket launched from European Space Agency’s base at Kourou, French Guiana, carrying Intelsat-v communication satellite to beam television and telephone signals round the world.
1989: Czechoslovakia announced plans to cut its armed forces by 12,000 men and to reduce its army by 15 per cent in following two years.
1990: United States vicepresident Dan Quayle began fence-mending trip to Honduras, Panama and Jamaica.
1990: Baby Alexandra Griffiths was reunited with her parents two weeks after her abduction from St Thomas’s Hospital in London.
1991: Allied aircraft bombed Iraq’s second city, Basra.
1995: Five thousand survivors of Auschwitz attended a service at the site of the Nazi concentration camp to mark the 50th anniversary of its liberation.
1996: Germany first observed International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
2002: An explosion at a military storage facility in Lagos, Nigeria, killed more than 1,000 people and displaced 20,000 others.
2004: Prime minister Tony Blair’s political authority reached an all-time low when his 161 majority was reduced to five, with 72 Labour MPS voting against tuition fees for English universities.
2006: Western Union discontinued its telegram and commercial messaging services.
2010: Porfirio Lobo Sosa became the new president of Honduras.
Births: 1756 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, musical prodigy and composer; 1832 Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson), mathematician and children’s author; ; 1924 Lord (Brian) Rix CBE, British actor and charitable worker.
Deaths: 1731 Bartolomeo Cristofori, Italian who developed the first pianos; 1851 John Audubon, artist and naturalist; 1901 Giuseppe Verdi, composer; 1989 Sir Thomas Sopwith, aviation pioneer; 2004 Rikki Fulton, actor and entertainer; 2009 John Updike, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist; 2010 JD Salinger, American author; 2014 Pete Seeger, American folk singer and songwriter.