NOW & THEN
27 AUGUST
55BC: Julius Caesar landed in Britain.
1776: The British defeated the Americans at the Battle of Long Island (also known as the Battle of Brooklyn).
1784: James Tytler, from Forfar – editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica – became the first person in Britain to fly in a hot-air balloon when he rose 350 feet and travelled half a mile from Holyrood Park, Edinburgh.
1813: Napoleon defeated the combined forces of Austrian, Russia and Prussia at the Battle of Dresden.
1883: Krakatoa, a volcanic island between Sumatra and Java, erupted with thousands killed by resulting tidal waves.
1892: The Metropolitan Opera House in New York was destroyed by fire.
1912: Tarzan Of The Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, first went into print as a magazine serial.
1913: Swedish engineer Gideon Sundback invented the zip fastener.
1922: Paavo Nurmi of Finland set a new world record time of 8:28.6 for the 3,000 metres.
1932: 200,000 English textile workers went on strike.
1939: The world’s first jetpropelled aeroplane, the Heinkel 178, made its first flight in Germany.
1944: 200 Halifax bombers attacked oil installations in Hamburg, Germany.
1950: BBC broadcast the first live pictures from continental Europe in a two-hour programme, transmitted from Calais, to commemorate the centenary of the first message sent by submarine from England to France.
1952: Emil Zatopek of Czechoslovakia won the 12th Olympic marathon.
1955: The first edition of the Guinness Book Of Records was published.
1958: USSR launched Sputnik 3 with two dogs aboard.
1960: Britain’s Anita Lonsbrough swam a new world record time of 2:49.5 for the 200 metres at the Olympic Games in Rome.
1962: Mariner 2, the first space probe to fly by Venus, was launched.
1966: Francis Chichester left Plymouth in Gipsy Moth IV on his single-handed voyage around the world.
1979: Earl Mountbatten was murdered by members of the IRA, in a fishing boat explosion off Mullaghmore, County Sligo.
1990: BBC Radio Five, Britain’s first new national radio station for 23 years, began broadcasting.
1991: European Community members recognised the independence of the Baltic states.
1995: The International Rugby Union Board, meeting in Paris, ended 125 years of amateur rugby and sanctioned payment to players and officials at all levels.
1995: Golfer Tiger Woods won the US Amateur Championship.
1996: Seven Iraqis were arrested after hijacking a Sudan Airways jet and ordering it to fly to Stansted in Essex.
2001: Mars made its closest approach to earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing as a distance of 34,646,418 miles.