NOW & THEN
23 SEPTEMBER
1122: The Concordat of Worms was agreed between Pope Calixtus II and the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V.
1459: The Battle of Blore Heath in Staffordshire was fought – the first major battle in the Wars of the Roses.
1678: The Earl of Mar was commissioned to raise a regiment, the “Earl of Mar’s Gray Breeks”, later the Royal Scots Fusiliers.
1809: A compound fountain pen was patented by Joseph Bramah, a London cabinet maker, who in 1797 had patented a water closet.
1817: Spain signed treaty with Britain to end slave trade.
1846: The planet Neptune was discovered by the German astronomer Johann Galle.
1848: Chewing-gum was first commercially produced by John Curtis on a stove in his home in Bangor, Maine, US, and sold under the name of the “State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum”.
1868: Tom Morris Jnr scored 154 at Prestwick Golf Club, three shots better than his father, Tom Morris Snr, to win the Open Championship.
1889: Nintendo Koppei (which became the Nintendo Company Ltd) was founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce and market a playing-card game.
1911: Earl Ovington became the first air mail pilot.
1912: The first Keystone Cops film, Cohen Collects a Debt, was released in America by Mack Sennett.
1926: Gene Tunney defeated Jack Dempsey in ten rounds to win the world heavyweight boxing title.
1940: The George Cross, the highest British civilian award for acts of courage, was instituted.
1941: General de Gaulle formed a government while in exile in London.
1951: King George VI had an operation to remove his left lung at Buckingham Palace.
1952: Rocky Marciano won the world heavyweight boxing title in Philadelphia, knocking out Jersey Joe Walcott in the 13th round.
1969: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, premiered.
1973: Former Argentine dictator Juan Peron was returned to power in Buenos Aires in presidential election.
1974: Ceefax, the BBC’S teletext service, was inaugurated.
1978: Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, returned home to hero’s welcome after Camp David summit that resulted in agreement on framework for peace with Israel.
1991: Skeleton frozen for more than 500 years was dug out of the Similaun Glacier in the Italian-austrian Alps. Still wearing traces of leather boots and clinging to an axe, it was believed to be remains of a hunter.
1991: Access to copies of all 800 Dead Sea Scrolls was thrown open by Huntingdon Library, California, breaking cartel of seven experts who had kept exclusive rights to key documents since scrolls were discovered more than 40 years earlier.
2002: The first public version of the web browser Mozilla Firefox (“Phoenix 0.1”) was released.
2004: At least 1,070 in Haiti were reported to have been killed by floods caused by Hurricane Jeanne.
2019: Thomas Cook, Britain’s oldest travel agency, collapsed after 178 years of trading.