NOW & THEN
OCTOBER 21
1520: Explorer Ferdinand Magellan and his fleet entered the strait separating the southern tip of South America from Tierra del Fuego. It would be named the Magellan Strait.
1555: English parliament refused to recognise Philip of Spain as king.
1805: Battle of Trafalgar in which Lord Nelson defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets, preventing a French invasion.
1824: Portland cement was patented by Joseph Aspdin, of Wakefield, Yorkshire.
1854: Florence Nightingale was despatched, along with a team of 38 nurses, to the Crimean War.
1858: The Can-can was first performed in Offenbach’s Orpheus In The Underworld, in Paris.
1879: The first effective electric light bulb worked for 14hr 30min. It was invented by Thomas Edison of New Jersey.
1918: The “Spanish flu” epidemic started in Britain, eventually killing approximately twice as many people as died in the First World War.
1940: Purchase tax introduced in Britain.
1948: A KLM Royal Dutch Airlines Constellation, flying from Amsterdam to New York, crashed in poor visibility near Tarbolton as it tried to land at Prestwick, with the loss of 39 lives. One passenger survived.
1950: Chinese forces occupied Tibet.
1950: The death penalty was abolished in Belgium.
1952: Britain declared state of emergency in Kenya as Mau Mau guerrilla activity intensified. More than 2,000 terrorism suspects were rounded up and Jomo Kenyatta, president of the Kenyan African Union, was arrested.
1958: First women peers were introduced to the House of Lords.
1959: The Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened in New York.
1960: Britain’s first nuclearpowered submarine, Dreadnought, was launched at Barrowin-furness, Cumbria on Trafalgar Day by Queen Elizabeth II.
1966: A colliery slag tip slid down the side of a hill and engulfed houses, a farm, and a school in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan, killing 144 people, 116 of them children.
1967: Israeli destroyer Eilat was sunk by Egyptian missiles.
1969: Willy Brandt was elected chancellor of West Germany.
1971: Gas explosion tore apart the centre of a block of 26 shops at Clarkston, Glasgow, killing 20 and injuring 105.
1980: Mikhail Gorbachev was elected as a full member of the Soviet Union’s Politburo.
1990: Edward Heath met Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, who promised to release some of his “human shield” hostages.
1991: Jesse Turner, an American hostage, was freed in Beirut after nearly five years in captivity.
1996: It was announced that the Stone of Destiny would be housed in the Crown Room at Edinburgh Castle when it was returned on St Andrew’s Day.
2014: Oscar Pistorius was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.