NOW & THEN
29 AUGUST
1782: The 100-tonne battleship HMS Royal George sank while at anchor at Spithead, with the loss of more than 900 lives, including Admiral Richard Kempenfelt.
1797: Battle of Tranent. A demonstration against conscription under the Militia Act was broken up by the Cinque Ports Dragoons and the East Lothian Yeomanry with the deaths of 12 participants.
1831: Michael Faraday demonstrated the production of electricity from magnetism with the first transformer.
1833: Factory Act was passed, regulating the employment of children.
1835: Melbourne in Australia was founded and was named after Lord Melbourne, prime minister of Britain at the time.
1842: The Treaty of Nanking was signed, ending the Opium War between China and Britain and ceding Hong Kong.
1882: England cricketers lost to Australia in England for the first time, and from an epitaph that appeared in the Sporting Times the word Ashes came into being.
1885: The first motorcycle was patented, built by Gottlieb Daimler in Cannstatt, Germany.
1897: “Chop-suey” (meaning “various things”) was devised by a New York chef to appeal to Chinese and American tastes.
1904: The third Olympic Games opened at St Louis, Missouri.
1909: First air race took place at Reims, France. It was won by Glenn Curtiss.
1929: Graf Zeppelin airship completed its tour of the world.
1930: St Kilda was evacuated on “economic” grounds.
1965: American astronauts L Gordon Cooper and Charles Conrad made safe landing in Atlantic after record eight-day orbit around Earth.
1966: The last live performance by the Beatles took place in Candlestick Park, San Francisco.
1988: Two Soviets and one Afghan blasted off from a Central Asian space centre to join cosmonauts seeking an endurance record aboard an orbiting Soviet space station.
1990: The Birmingham Six, jailed in 1975 for the pub bombings that killed 21 people, had their cases considered by the Court of Appeal for the third time. They were eventually released.
1994: Israel struck an outline deal with the PLO on selfgovernment for Palestinians on the Gaza Strip and the West Bank city of Jericho.
1995: Eduard Shevardnadze, president of Georgia, survived an assassination attempt when a bomb exploded outside parliament in the capital, Tblisi.
2003: Alastair Campbell resigned as prime minister Tony Blair’s director of communications in the wake of the death of the government’s chief weapons inspector, Doctor David Kelly, and its row with the BBC over the war in Iraq.
2005: Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, causing massive flooding and thousands of deaths. Martial law was declared amid reports of looting and rapes, and President George Bush was criticised over the speed of the relief operation.
2017: Kezia Dugdale resigned as leader of the Scottish Labour Party.