TODAY IN HISTORY

In 1946, the world’s first electronic computer, “ENIAC,” was switched on. The Electronic Numerical Integration and Computer weighed several tonnes and contained 1,800 tubes, but wasn’t nearly as powerful as today’s pocket calculator.

Also on this date:

➤ In 1542, the fifth wife of England’s King Henry VIII, Catherine Howard, was executed for adultery.

➤ In 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition. More than three centuries later, in 1992, the Vatican acknowledged that the excommunicated Italian astronomer correctly said the Earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa.

➤ In 1759, Nova Scotia became the first legislature in British territory to use a secret ballot.

➤ In 1838, William Lyon Mackenzie fled to the United States after he led an abortive uprising against the establishment families that virtually ruled Toronto.

➤ In 1866, the James-Younger gang carried out their first bank robbery, in Lincoln, Mo. Jesse James was 19.

➤ In 1900, the national organization of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire was established in Montreal.

➤ In 1917, Mata Hari, accused of being a German spy, was arrested by French police. She was later executed by a firing squad.

➤ In 1947, an oil well dubbed Imperial Leduc No. 1 became the biggest oil strike in Canadian history when it began producing near Edmonton. The discovery touched off a drilling boom across Alberta and led to the establishment of the province’s oil and natural gas industry.

➤ In 1935, a jury in Flemington, N.J., found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-slaying of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. (Hauptmann was later executed.)