TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Monday, January 4, the fourth day of 2021. There are 361 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1847 — Samuel Colt sells his first revolver pistol to the United States Government.
1853 — Solomon Northup is freed from slavery after having been kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South. His memoir Twelve Years a Slave later becomes a bestseller.
1862 — Following a week of persistent rain, a heavy downpour brings flooding and wreaks havoc in the goldmining workings in Gabriels Gully.
1869 — Following a sixday siege, Te Kooti is defeated at Ngatapa. He escapes overnight, but 120 prisoners are shot by Ngati Porou warriors and colonial troops.
1885 — Dr William Grant, of Davenport, Iowa, performs what is believed to be the first appendectomy.
1903 — After being involved in several wellpublicised incidents, attributed to the actions of either her drunken handler or Luna Park’s (Coney Island, New York) new publicityhungry owners, Topsy the elephant is fed poison, electrocuted and strangled in front of a small crowd of invited guests and reporters. The film of the electrocution was released for viewing in coinoperated kinetoscopes. It is believed to be the first filmed execution of an animal.
1910 — Suffering major damage in Dusky Sound, the SS Waikare is successfully run aground on Stop Island by the captain, saving all passengers and crew. The vessel is wrecked.
1923 — Vladimir Lenin dictates a postscript to his ‘‘Lenin’s Testament’’ in which he suggests Stalin is too rude to be secretarygeneral and should be replaced.
1930 — Douglas Mawson discovers what became known as Mac. Robertson Land in the Antarctic.
1932 — The British Raj introduces emergency powers as the Indian National Congress is declared illegal and Mahatma Gandhi is arrested.
1936 — Billboard magazine in the United States prints the first popularmusic chart.
1938 — The flying boat Centaurus arrives in Dunedin.
1944 — Allied forces launch an attack east of Cassino, Italy, in World War 2.
1948 — The Union of Burma becomes an independent republic.
1951— North Korean and communist Chinese forces capture Seoul, Korea. 1958 — A team led by Sir Edmund Hillary reaches the South Pole using modified tractors; Sputnik I, the world’s first artificial satellite, launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union, falls to Earth.
1964 — Pope Paul VI begins a visit to the Holy Land. It was the first visit by a pope to Jerusalem.
1967 — Donald Campbell, British car and speedboat racer, is killed on Coniston Water in England during an attempt to break the world water speed record.
1972 — Rose Heilbron becomes the first female judge to sit in the Old Bailey in London, England.
1973 — The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts is robbed of $US2 million worth of art, including a Rembrandt valued at $US1 million.
1990 — An overloaded passenger train collides with an empty freight train near Sukkur in the Sindh Province of Pakistan, resulting in the deaths of 307 people and 700 more being injured.
1999 — Europe’s new currency, the euro, makes a strong debut on the financial markets.
2004 — A Hughes 500 369HS helicopter loses radio contact with the Milford radio tower while between the Routeburn Track and Milford Sound. Despite an extensive sixday search, the wreckage and bodies of the two people aboard are not found for almost nine years, until the crash site is spotted by a commercial pilot by chance on a rocky hillside near Humboldt Creek.
2010 — The Burj Khalifa officially opens in Dubai. At a total height of 829.8m, it is the tallest building in the world.
2012 — The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) confirms Dunedin had its driest December since records were first taken at the Musselburgh site in 1918, just 9mm of rain falling compared with the monthly average of 81mm. Dunedin was the fourth-driest southern centre, Clyde recording 7mm and Gore and Manapouri both registering 8mm of rain for the month.