NOW & THEN
FEBRUARY 5
1782: Spanish forces captured Minorca from Britain.
1792: Tippoo of Mysore, India, was defeated in war with Britain, and Hyderabad ceded half of Mysore to the British. He resumed hostilities in 1798-99.
1811: The Prince of Wales became Prince Regent on the established chronic porphyria of George III.
1850: Frank S Baldwin patented the first adding machine. It was 20 inches high and weighed 8lb.
1918: Church and state in Russia were officially separated.
1920: Royal Air Force College at Cranwell opened and had its first intake of apprentices.
1922: First issue of Reader’s Digest published, in New York.
1924: The BBC “pips” or time signals from Greenwich Observatory were heard for the first time.
1931: Captain Malcolm Campbell, driving Bluebird, set a world land speed record of 245mph at Daytona Beach. He was the first man to exceed 200mph.
1962: The conjunction of Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn was watched with interest by astronomers. In India the end of the world was forecast and all events were cancelled, including weddings, as people waited for doomsday.
1967: The Musicians’ Union banned the Rolling Stones’s Let’s Spend The Night Together from the Eamonn Andrews television show.
1971: Astronauts from US Apollo 14 landed on the Moon.
1976: Almost 23,000 lives lost in Guatemala earthquake.
1982: Laker Airlines, created by Sir Freddie Laker to cut prices and make air travel more accessible, collapsed with debts of £270million.
1989: Sky Television, headed by Rupert Murdoch, launched the first four of its six planned channels.
1996: United States president Bill Clinton was ordered to testify at the trial of Susan Mcdougal, one of his partners in the failed Whitewater Arkansas land deal.
1997: The so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announced the creation of a $71 million fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.
2000: Russian forces murdered at least 60 civilians in Grozny, Chechnya.
2002: Two pilots found guilty of “gross negligence” by the
Ministry of Defence after the Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash, in which 29 people died, were cleared by a specially constituted House of Lords committee.
2004: Twenty-three Chinese people drowned when 35 cockle-pickers were trapped by rising tides in Morecambe Bay, England. Twenty-one bodies were recovered.
2004: Rebels from the Revolutionary Artibonite Resistance Front captured the city of Gonaives, starting the Haiti rebellion.
2008: A tornado outbreak across the southern US left 57 dead, the most since the 1985 outbreak that killed 88.
2009: The Bank of England reduced interest rates to a record low of 1 per cent in an attempt to boost the shrinking economy.
BIRTHDAYS
Bobby Brown, singer, 51; Svengöran Eriksson, Swedish football coach, 72; Jo Swinson CBE, leader of Liberal Democrats 2019, 40; Russell Grant, astrologer, 69; Susan Hill CBE, British novelist and playwright, 78; Jennifer Jason Leigh, US actress, 58; Michael Mann, US film director, 77; Cristiano Ronaldo, Portuguese footballer, 35; Michael Sheen OBE, Welsh actor, 51; Tom Wilkinson OBE, actor 72; David Denton, Zimbabwe-born Scottish international rugby player, 30.
ANNIVERSARIES
Births: 1788 Sir Robert Peel, three times prime minister, founder of Conservative Party; 1840 John Boyd Dunlop, Scottish vet and patentee of pneumatic tyre; 1840 Sir Hiram Maxim, US inventor of first fully automatic machine-gun; 1893 Captain WE Johns, First World War pilot and author, creator of Biggles; 1900 Adlai Stevenson, US Democrat statesman; 1914 William Burroughs, writer; 1920 Frank Muir, writer and broadcaster.
Deaths: 1881 Thomas Carlyle, essayist and historian; 1941 Andrew “Banjo” Paterson, Australian journalist who adapted Waltzing Matilda from a traditional ditty; 1988 Emeric Pressburger, film producer.