TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Wednesday, January 6, the sixth day of 2021. There are 359 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1838 — Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrates the telegraph, in Morristown, New Jersey.
1839 — Octavius Hadfield is the first Anglican priest to be ordained in New Zealand; in what is termed the Night of the Big Wind, a powerful windstorm sweeps across Ireland and the United Kingdom resulting in several hundred deaths, along with nearly a quarter of the houses in north Dublin being severely damaged or destroyed, and 42 ships wrecked.
1886 — The New Zealand Educational Institute holds its first annual meeting.
1895 — The first service is held in St Paul’s Cathedral, Dunedin.
1907 — Maria Montessori opens her first school and daycare centre for children of working parents in Rome, Italy.
1910 — The 1.4km Elgin Rd cablecar extension in Dunedin closes.
1912 — Alfred Wegener, geophysicist and meteorologist, presents his controversial theory of continental drift in a lecture to the German Geological Society at the SenckenbergMuseum, Frankfurt; New Mexico becomes the 47th state of the United States.
1919 — Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the US (19011909), dies. An expansionist politician, he acquired the Panama Canal Zone (1903). He also made an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 1912.
1929 — King Alexander of Yugoslavia abolishes the constitution, dissolves the Government and establishes a royal dictatorship; Mother Teresa arrives in Calcutta to begin her work among India’s poor.
1930 — The first dieselpowered road trip by an automobile is completed in the US, travelling from Indianapolis to New York.
1941 — US president Franklin Roosevelt defines the American goal of Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
1942 — The Pan American Airways
Pacific Clipper arrives in New York after making the first roundtheworld trip by a commercial aeroplane.
1945 — The Battle of the Bulge, one of the most significant World War 2 battles, ends with an Allied forces victory.
1947 — Pan American Airlines becomes the first commercial airline to offer a roundtheworld ticket.
1953 — Godfrey Bowen sets a world record by shearing 456 fullwool sheep in nine hours, eclipsing the mark set 10 years earlier by P. de Malmanche of 409.
1960 — National Airlines Flight 2511 is destroyed in midair by a bomb, while flying from New York City to Miami.
1963 — Two policemen and a member of the public are killed in a Waitakere shooting; Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi launches his ‘‘white revolution’’, including redistributing land to peasants and giving women the vote.
1975 — Over 1000 Led Zeppelin fans, waiting overnight inside the lobby of the Boston Garden for tickets to go on sale for the group’s concert a month later, cause a riot and an estimated US$30,000 worth of damage.
1994 — Figureskater Nancy Kerrigan is clubbed on the leg by an assailant in Detroit. Four men, including the exhusband of Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding, are sentenced to prison.
1995 — A chemical fire in an apartment complex in Manila, Philippines, leads to the discovery of plans for Project Bojinka, a mass terrorist attack.
2005 — South Africa’s Nelson Mandela announces that his son, Makgatho, has died of Aids, challenging the taboo that keeps many Africans from discussing the epidemic.