NOW & THEN
22 SEPTEMBER
1527: Cardinal Wolsey was stripped of the office of Lord Chancellor of England.
1692: The last eight people were hanged for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts (20 had been hanged in total).
1699: The people of Rotterdam went on strike over the high cost of butter.
1735: Sir Robert Walpole became the first Prime Minister to occupy No 10 Downing Street.
1745: Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army returned to Edinburgh.
1761: The coronation of King George III.
1792: The French Republic was formed by National Convention, stripping the king of his powers, and the revolutionary calendar went into effect.
1862: American president Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, ordering the freeing of slaves.
1888: The National Geographic magazine was first published.
1896: Queen Victoria surpassed her grandfather King George III as the longest reigning monarch in British history. Her record was beaten by Queen Elizabeth II in 2015.
1902: The earliest British airship, 75 feet long and built by Stanley Spencer, made its maiden flight from Crystal Palace, London.
1905: During a race riot in Atlanta, Georgia, ten black people and two white were killed.
1910: The Duke of York’s Picture House opened in Brighton. It is still operating today, making it the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain.
1934: The Gresford pit disaster in north Wales claimed the lives of 265 miners.
1949: Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, four years after first US nuclear detonation.
1955: Commercial TV started in Britain – the first advertisement was for Gibbs toothpaste.
1965: Ceasefire was declared in war between India and Pakistan, but both sides later violated it.
1972: Idi Amin gave Uganda’s 8,000 Asians 48 hours to leave the country.
1975: A woman political activist was arrested after trying to assassinate American president Gerald Ford in San Francisco.
1980: A Gulf war broke out when Iraq invaded Iran in an attempt to control the Shatt el Arab waterway on the Persian Gulf.
1980: Workers in Poland formed a new independent labour union, Solidarity.
1986: Two hijackers seized a Soviet airliner at Ural Mountains airport and killed two passengers before security agents recaptured the plane and shot the hijackers.
1988: A radio operator died at his post sending distress messages after an explosion and fire on board the Ocean Odyssey drilling rig in the North Sea. Sixty-six men escaped.
1990: The Natural History Museum solved the Piltdown Man hoax. The culprit was the anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith.
1990: Alex Salmond was elected convener of SNP.
2003: David HemplemanAdams became the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an open-air, wicker-basket hot air balloon.