Now & Then
10 JANUARY
1642 AD: King Charles I and his family fled London for Oxford during the prelude to the English Civil War.
1812: An impenetrable fog of sooty smoke and polluted mist shrouded London so totally that midday was like midnight.
1828: The lowest-ever denomination note was issued by the Bank of England – worth one penny.
1839: Tea from India first arrived in the UK.
1840: Sir Rowland Hill’s Penny Post came into force in Britain. 1840: Shorthand inventor Isaac Pitman advertised the first correspondence course.
1845: Poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning began corresponding. In September 1846 they eloped to get married.
1861: Florida seceded from the Union during the build-up to the American Civil War.
1863: The world’s first underground railway – the Metropolitan line – opened in London.
1920: The League of Nations came into being, holding its first meeting in Geneva. It was dissolved on the same date in 1946, and superseded by the UN.
1928: Leon Trotsky ordered into exile by the Soviet government. 1947: Fifteen miners died in an explosion at Burngrange Colliery, Midlothian, caused by flame from an open acetylene lamp.
1949: RCA introduced the 45rpm record.
1952: The Greatest Show on Earth, starring James Stewart and Charlton Heston, premiered in New York.
1953: The European Coal and Steel Community met for the first time.
1956: Elvis Presley recorded Heartbreak Hotel.
1958: Great Balls of Fire, by Jerry Lee Lewis, became No 1 in the UK pop charts.
1977: Two Soviet cosmonauts went into space to join the crew of orbiting Salyut research station. 1985: Sir Clive Sinclair unveiled the £399 C5 battery and pedalpowered tricycle, with a range of 20 miles. He predicted that by the year 2000 the petrol engine would be a thing of the past.
1989: Astronomers discovered a 90-trillion-mile long stream of gas that appeared to be feeding a black hole at the centre of Earth’s Milky Way galaxy.
1990: China ended seven months of martial law in Beijing. Tiananmen Square was opened for the first time since the June 1989 massacre. 1991: Last-ditch talks to prevent war in the Gulf failed in Geneva. 1992: A bomb exploded in Whitehall, only 300 metres away from Downing Street. The IRA claimed responsibility.
1993: Iraqis crossed into Kuwait and seized four Silkworm missiles. 1998: Donald Dewar, the Scottish Secretary, announced he had chosen Holyrood as the site for the new Scottish Parliament building, and that it would be ready for the autumn session of 2001.
2005: A mudslide occurred in La Conchita, California, killed ten people, and closed the coast road between San Francisco and Los Angeles, for ten days.
2011: Torrential rain in Queensland’s Lockyer Valley caused severe flash flooding, killing nine people.