NOW & THEN
16 APRIL
1746: The Jacobites were defeated by the Duke of Cumberland’s forces at Culloden, terminating attempts by the Stuarts to regain the throne.
1912: American pilot Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the English Channel, from Dover to Hardelot.
1917: A large crowd in Petrograd welcomed Lenin back from exile in Switzerland.
1924: The Metro Goldwyn Mayer film studio was formed
– a merger between Metrogoldwyn and the Louis B Mayer Company.
1929: The first machine for making tea bags was patented by Paul von Korosy.
1942: India’s Congress rejected terms of self-government offered by Britain.
1947: Fires and explosions wrecked Texas City, Texas, as French freighter loaded with nitrate blew up, leaving eventual death toll of more than 500.
1948: The Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (EEC) was set up.
1951: The British submarine Affray sank in the English Channel with the loss of 75 lives.
1953: The Royal yacht Britannia was launched by the Queen from John Brown’s yard on the Clyde.
1964: Twelve members of the Great Train Robbery gang were sentenced to a total of 307 years in jail.
1972: Apollo 16 was launched with John Young, Charles Duke and Thomas Mattingley; Young and Duke made the fifth Moon landing.
1975: Cambodian government in Phnom Penh asked for truce and offered to yield to Communist forces sweeping into city.
1979: Seven killed, 63 injured, in head-on collision between trains at Wellneuk Junction, Paisley.
1990: Explosion caused by leaking gas killed at least 80 people on a commuter train in Bihar, India.
1990: Nelson Mandela was hailed by a 70,000 crowd at Wembley Stadium.
1991: First 300 United Nations observers arrived in Kuwait to monitor ceasefire.
1992: President Mohammad Najibullah of Afghanistan was deposed in an army coup.
1993: The year’s second national rail strike kept thousands of commuters at home for a second Friday in two weeks.
1994: A British Sea Harrier was shot down over Gorazde in Bosnia,
as United Nations jets tried to halt a Serbian assault on the town.
2003: The Treaty of Accession was signed in Athens admitting ten new member states to the European Union.
2004: The super liner RMS Queen Mary 2 embarked on her first trans-atlantic crossing.
2007: A gunman killed 32 students and staff at Virginia Tech University, Blacksburg in America’s then worst peacetime shooting. Cho Seung Hui, a student at the university, then shot himself.
2009: Scientists created a clock that takes 300 million years to lose just one second.
2014: A ferry carrying 475 passengers, mostly schoolchildren, capsized and sank off the coast of South Korea. Rescuers reported 14 people confirmed dead and more than 280 missing.