ON THIS DAY
1852 French engineer Henri Giffard takes his steam-powered, hydrogenfilled airship on a maiden 27km flight from Paris.
1853 France annexes most of New Caledonia as a future penal colony. Violent resistance by local inhabitants will continue until 1988.
1869 Panic hits the US sharemarket on ”Black Friday” over an attempt by speculators James Fisk and Jay Gould to corner the US gold market.
1877 Japan’s modern army crushes a rebellion by 40,000 feudal samurai warriors fighting for their traditional way of life. Three rebel chiefs commit suicide.
1890 The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounces polygamy.
1945 Australian waterside workers, in support of Indonesian demands for independence, ban the loading of Dutch ships bound for the Netherlands East Indies.
1948 Soichiro Honda, a mechanical engineer who used to make piston rings, founds the Honda Motor Co in Japan to make motorcycles.
1960 The first nuclearpowered aircraft carrier in the world, the USS Enterprise, is launched from Virginia. The massive vessel holds a crew of 5500.
1976 American newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst (pictured) is sentenced to seven years in prison for her part in a 1974 bank robbery.
1987 A British bid to ban Spycatcher, the memoirs of former MI5 agent Peter Wright, is rejected by the NSW Court of Appeal. 1993
Sydney hears IOC head Juan Antonio Samaranch announce that it has won the 2000 Olympics.
2002 Mother-of-three Dianne Brimble, 42, dies on the cruise ship Pacific Sky after taking a lethal dose of the drug fantasy.
2002 Britain publishes a dossier on Iraq’s weapons program which claims Saddam Hussein can launch a weapon of mass destruction.