NOW & THEN
31 DECEMBER
1687: The first Huguenots set sail from France for the Cape of Good Hope, to escape religious persecution. They took with them vines and created the South African wine industry.
1695: The window tax was imposed, which resulted in many being bricked up.
1857: Queen Victoria named Ottawa as the capital of Canada.
1879: American inventor Thomas A Edison gave the first demonstration of his electric incandescent light at Menlo Park, New Jersey.
1904: The steamer Stromboli, outward bound, collided with the Glasgow steamer Kathleen, loaded with iron ore, at Garvel Point, Greenock. Both sank and two of the Kathleen’s engineers drowned.
1911: Marie Curie received her second Nobel prize, unprecedented in the award’s history .
1915: Armoured cruiser Natal blew up and sank at her moorings in the Cromarty Firth. About 350 officers and men died along with 13 civilians, including children attending a Hogmanay party on board. Of the 283 survivors picked up, several died later. Unstable cordite in her stern magazine was blamed for the explosion.
1917: Britain’s first-ever food rationing began. It was for sugar and the allowance was 8oz per week.
1923: Chimes of London’s Big Ben were first broadcast.
1927: The use of the lance was abandoned in British Army.
1929: Seventy children, aged between five and 14, were crushed, trampled or suffocated to death when panic broke out at a matinee in the Glen Cinema, in Paisley. The audience of children stampeded for the exit when some smoke from a smouldering film blew into the auditorium.
1931: Sergei Rachmaninov’s music was banned in Soviet Union as decadent.
1935: Charles Darrow patented his board game Monopoly, which he had first invented in 1933.
1945: The Home Guard defence force was disbanded.
1960: Last day of National Service call-up in United Kingdom.
1960: The farthing ceased to be legal tender.
1968: Russia’s TU144 flew – the world’s first supersonic airliner.
1973: Three-day working week introduced in Britain as a measure to conserve fuel during miners’ strike.
1990: The old 5p piece ceased
to be legal tender.
1991: Soviet Union formally ceased to exist at midnight.
1995: Tens of thousands of homes across Scotland were flooded when frozen water pipes thawed out after record low temperatures.
1996: Former Beatle Paul Mccartney, 54, received a knighthood in the New Year Honours List.
1996: A safety review of Edinburgh’s giant Hogmanay party was ordered after 600 people were treated in hospital when crash barriers collapsed. The 350,000 revellers left behind 100 tons of rubbish.
1999: Millions of people throughout the world celebrated the new millennium with fireworks and parties.
2008: Sixty-two people died in a fire in a nightclub in the Thai capital, Bangkok.