NOW & THEN
JANUARY 11
1569: The first recorded lottery in England was drawn in St Paul’s Cathedral.
1671: The High Court of Justiciary reconstituted as the supreme criminal court in Scotland.
1693: Mount Etna in Sicily erupted.
1839: An earthquake of magnitude 7.8 struck the Caribbean island of Martinique, destroying half of the former capital, Fort Royal, leading to 700 deaths.
1841: The electric clock was patented by John Barwise and Alexander Bain.
1864: Charing Cross Station in London opened.
1866: The British steamship SS London, overloaded with cargo, sank in the Bay of Biscay with the loss of 220 lives.
1905: The cost of a third-class ticket by liner from Britain to America went up to £6.
1918: The Representation of the People Act was passed, giving votes to women.
1919: Romania annexed Transylvania.
1922: Leonard Thompson, aged 14, became the first diabetic patient to be treated successfully with insulin, at Toronto General Hospital.
1935: Pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart flew from Honolulu to California.
1942: Japanese took Kuala Lumpur, Malaya.
1945: Truce was declared in Greek civil war.
1946: Albania was proclaimed a people’s republic.
1962: Avalanche buried village in the Peruvian Andes; 3,000 reported killed.
1963: The first disco, called Whisky-a-go-go, opened in Los Angeles.
1970: In Nigeria, 32-month-old secessionist Biafran regime collapsed under onslaughts by Nigerian government.
1973: The Open University awarded its first degrees to 867 students.
1974: The first sextuplets to survive were born in Cape Town, South Africa.
1976: President Rodriguez Lara of Ecuador ousted in a coup.
1989: More Cuban troops left Angola under a United Statesbrokered agreement among Cuba, South Africa and Angola.
1990: 250,000 Lithuanians demonstrated for independence.
1991: Soviet tanks stormed key buildings in Vilnius, killing 15, as
Moscow countered Lithuanian independence moves.
1996: One of the greatest private collections of surrealist and dadaist art, including works by Dali, Magritte, Bacon, Ernst and Man Ray, was bequeathed to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, by Gabrielle Keiller.
2007: Author JK Rowling completed the final Harry Potter novel (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) in room 552 of the Balmoral Hotel, Edinburgh
2008: American athlete Marion Jones, 32, was jailed for six months for lying about drug use and cheque fraud. She had already admitted taking a performance enhancing drug from 1999, a year before she won three gold medals and two bronze at the Sydney Olympics. She had already returned her medals.