FEBRUARY 16
1659: Nicholas Vanacker wrote the first cheque, for £10, to have been drawn on a British bank.
1871: Franco-prussian War ended in defeat for France.
1918: Dover was bombarded by a German submarine.
1932: Fianna Fáil party, headed by Eamon de Valera, won Irish general election.
1937: The word “nylon” was adopted by du Pont chemists for the textile fibre. Within a year the first nylon stockings were on sale.
1940: A boarding party from HMS Cossack rescued more than 300 British prisoners from the Altmark, a German naval auxiliary ship in Norwegian waters. The prisoners had all been taken from ships sunk by the Graf Spee.
1949: Chaim Weizmann was sworn in at Jerusalem as first president of the state of Israel.
1959: Fidel Castro became prime minister of Cuba after overthrowing Batista regime.
1962: Anti-government riots broke out in Georgetown, British Guiana.
1963: The Beatles went to No
1 in the pop charts for the first time, with Please Please Me.
1965: A government report was published, based on the research of Dr Richard Beeching, with plans to cut the British Rail network by half.
1967: Fiddler on the Roof musical was premiered in London.
1974: Scottish Astrological Association founded in Edinburgh.
1976: A pile of bricks – depicted as a work of art – provoked criticism when it went on show at London’s Tate Gallery.
1978: Leon Spinks beat Muhammad Ali to win the world heavyweight boxing championship in Las Vegas.
1989: Unemployment was below two million for the first time since February 1981.
1990: Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, went into hiding against possible attempts by Muslims to carry out Ayatollah Khomeini’s order to kill him.
1990: Royal Navy wives marched through Plymouth and Portsmouth to oppose a Ministry of Defence decision to allow Wrens to go to sea.
1991: Terrorists working for drug traffickers claimed responsibility for car bomb explosion that killed 22 and injured 140 in Medellin, Colombia.
1994: A radical shake-up of the Scottish court system proposed “voluntary” fines for thousands of minor criminal offences.
1995: The government announced that Shell UK had been given permission to dump its Brent Spar North Sea oil platform in the mid-atlantic.
1996: Rescue workers battled to prevent an environmental disaster off the Welsh coast after oil tanker Sea Empress ran aground on its way into Milford Haven.
1999: Across Europe, Kurdish rebels took over embassies and held hostages after Turkey arrested one of their rebel leaders, Abdullah Ocalan.
2005: The Kyoto Protocol came into force, following its ratification by Russia.
2011: Research by psychologists at Edinburgh Napier University revealed that the use of social network site Facebook can be the cause of stress.