ON THIS DAY
1770 Captain Cook leaves Botany Bay.
1840 The “penny black’’ stamp, issued in Britain, goes into circulation there as the first prepaid adhesive postage stamp in history.
1860 General Giuseppe Garibaldi and his “Thousand Redshirts’’ sail from Genoa to conquer Sicily and Naples.
1875 Ernest Giles and his party leave Beltana, South Australia, to cross to the west coast by camel over the Great Victoria Desert.
1910 Britain’s King Edward VII dies in London after a nine-year reign. The sports fan was popular, despite scandals.
1937 The German airship Hindenburg explodes on landing at Lakehurst, New Jersey (pictured). Horrified spectators watch the dirigible burn; 36 die.
1954 Roger Bannister breaks fourminute barrier for the mile, in Oxford.
1960 Princess Margaret marries commoner Anthony Armstrong-Jones in Westminster Abbey.
1974 West German Chancellor Willy Brandt quits after an aide is charged with spying for East Germany.
1984 A mutilated body of a tortured man is found weighed down in the Murrumbidgee River near Griffith during a Mafia power struggle. A similar corpse is found the next day. They are Rocco Medici and his brother-in-law Giuseppe Furina.
1996 A $120m international film and television studio at Sydney Showgrounds is approved by the state government for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Studios.
1998 Steve Jobs introduced Apple’s first iMac, a personal computer that became hugely successful and helped revive the struggling company.