Now & Then
5 FEBRUARY
1782: Spanish forces captured Minorca Island from the British. 1792: Tippoo of Mysore, India, was defeated in war with the British, and Hyderabad ceded half of Mysore to the British. He resumed hostilities in 1798-99.
1811: The Prince of Wales became Prince Regent on the established chronic porphyria of George III. 1850: Frank S Baldwin patented the first adding machine. It was 20 inches high and weighed 8lb. 1918: Church and state in Russia were officially separated.
1920: Royal Air Force College at Cranwell opened and had its first intake of apprentices.
1922: First issue of Reader’s Digest published in New York.
1924: The BBC “pips” or time signals from Greenwich Observatory were heard for the first time.
1931: Captain Malcolm Campbell, driving Bluebird, set the world land speed record of 245 mph at Daytona Beach. He was the first man to exceed 200 mph.
1962: The conjunction of Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn was watched with interest by astronomers. In India the end of the world was forecast and all events were cancelled, including Hindu weddings, as people waited for doomsday.
1967: The Musicians’ Union banned the Rolling Stones’s Let’s Spend The Night Together from the Eamonn Andrews television show.
1971: Astronauts from US Apollo 14 landed on the Moon.
1976: Almost 23,000 lives lost in Guatemala earthquake.
1982: Laker Airlines, created by former British pilot Sir Freddie Laker to cut prices and make air travel more accessible, collapsed with debts of £270 million.
1989: Sky Television, headed by Rupert Murdoch, launched the first four of its six planned channels. 1996: United States president Bill Clinton was ordered to testify at the trial of Susan Mcdougal, one of his partners in the failed Whitewater Arkansas land deal. 1997: The so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announced the creation of a $71 million fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.
2000: Russian forces massacred at least 60 civilians in the Novye Aldi suburb of Grozny, Chechnya. 2002: Two pilots found guilty of “gross negligence” by the Ministry of Defence after the Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash, in which 29 people died, were cleared by a specially constituted House of Lords committee.
2004: Twenty-three Chinese people drowned when a group of 35 cockle-pickers were trapped by rising tides in Morecambe Bay, England. Twenty-one bodies were recovered.
2004: Rebels from the Revolutionary Artibonite Resistance Front captured the city of Gonaives, starting the Haiti rebellion.
2008: A major tornado outbreak across the Southern United States left 57 dead, the most since the 1985 outbreak that killed 88. 2009: Undefeated world super-middleweight and lightheavyweight boxing champion Joe Calzaghe announced his decision to retire. The 36-yearold Welshman quit the ring with a glittering record of 46 wins from 46 fights.