TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Thursday, August 6, the 219th day of 2020. There are 147 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1840 — Louis Napoleon attempts an uprising in Boulogne, France, but it fails and he is later sentenced to life imprisonment.
1850 — Hone Heke dies at Kaikohe from tuberculosis, having made peace with the government and presented his mere to GovernorinChief Sir George Grey in 1848.
1862 — Alfred Domett becomes New Zealand’s fourth premier, serving until October 1863.
1888 — The woman thought to have been Jack the Ripper’s first victim, 35yearold prostitute Martha Turner, is stabbed to death in Whitechapel in London’s East End.
1890 — Convicted murderer William Kemmler becomes the first human put to death in an electric chair, at Auburn Prison, New York.
1904 — The Ranfurly Shield is contested for the first time in a rugby match at Auckland’s Alexandra Park, when Wellington beats Auckland 63.
1906 — Joseph George Ward (Liberal) replaces William HallJones as New Zealand’s 17th prime minister, serving until March 1912.
1915 — In World War 1, fresh Allied landings of 25,000 men at Suvla Bay on the Gallipoli Peninsula fail, largely due to the apathy of General Stopforth, who slept on a ship at the critical time.
1918 — The Second Battle of the Marne, the last major German attack of World War 1, ends in failure when an Allied counterattack, supported by several hundred tanks, overwhelms the Germans on their right flank, inflicting severe casualties.
1926 — The first movies with sound premiere in New York; American Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim the English Channel.
1936 — Jack Lovelock wins the 1500m gold medal at the Berlin Olympic Games in a worldrecord time of 3min 47.8sec.
1945 — In the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare, a United States plane drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, near the end of World War 2, killing at least 117,000 people.
1960 — Chubby Checker performs his version of
The Twist on The Dick Clark Show, starting a worldwide dance craze.
1990 — Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto is ousted by the military after 20 months as prime minister; the UN Security Council imposes an economic embargo on Iraq for invading Kuwait.
1996 — US scientists claim to have found evidence of ancient life on Mars in remnants of a meteorite discovered in the Antarctic.
2011 — The final representative game of rugby is played at Carisbrook. Southland beats Otago 1912; the curtainraiser was the club premier final played between Taieri and Harbour.
Taieri won its first banner since 1955, beating Harbour
126.
2012 — Mt Tongariro erupts for the first time in 100 years. The steam and ash eruption sends a plume 7000m into the night sky and creates three new vents near the Te Mari craters; a week after the women’s shotput competition took place at the London Olympic Games, Valerie Adams is awarded a gold medal after the original winner was disqualified for testing positive for an anabolic steroid.