TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY is Tuesday, January 19, the 19th day of 2021. There are 346 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:

1419 — The French city of Rouen surrenders to England’s Henry V in the Hundred Years’ War, completing his conquest of Normandy.

1493 — France and Spain sign the Treaty of Barcelona.

1607 — San Agustin Church in Manila is officially completed. It is the oldest church still standing in the Philippines.

1764 — Danish historian Bolle Willum Luxdorph records in his diary that a mail bomb, possibly the world’s first, severely injured a Colonel Poulsen, who was residing at Borglum Abbey. The perpetrator was never found.

1788 — The second group of ships of the First Fleet that departed Portsmouth, England, eight months earlier for the penal colony in New South Wales, arrive at Botany Bay.

1795 — The Batavian Republic is proclaimed in the Netherlands, bringing an end to the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

1845 — Despite the flagstaff at Russell being heavily guarded, Hone Heke cuts it down for a third time. Heke was responsible for the flagstaff being felled four times.

1852 — Governor Wynyard, the first New Zealandbuilt steamboat, begins commercial operations in Auckland.

1877 — The Port Chalmers water supply

opens.

1880 — The Burns Club is formed at a meeting in Dunedin’s Queen’s Hotel.

1883 — In the United States, the first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, and built by Thomas Edison, comes into service in Roselle, New Jersey.

1899 — AngloEgyptian Sudan is for

med.

1915 — The first casualties to result from an air raid over Britain occur when a Zeppelin drops six bombs on Great Yarmouth; two people die and three are injured; Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.

1917 — In Silvertown in West Ham, Essex, an explosion at a munitions factory kills 73, injures more than 400 others and causes widespread damage.

1920 — The US Senate votes against joining the League of Nations.

1930 — Four female trampers and their guide die in a blizzard on the Tasman Glacier.

1937 — Flying an H1 Racer fitted with longer wings, US business magnate Howard Hughes establishes a new transcontinental airspeed record by flying nonstop from Los Angeles to Newark in 7hr 28min 25sec, eclipsing his own previous record of 9hr 27min. His average groundspeed over the flight was 322mph (518kmh).

1940 — Starring The Three Stooges, the first Hollywood film to satirise Adolf Hitler, You Nazty Spy!, is released.

1945 — In World War 2, Soviet forces liberate the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. Of the 164,000 inhabitants in May 1940, only 877 survived.

1946 — The Otago Health District imposes restrictions on movement in public places because of an outbreak of infantile paralysis (poliomyelitis). The ban imposed by health authorities prohibited children under the age of 16 from attending public gatherings and travelling by public conveyance outside the Otago and Southland health districts. Schools were closed until March 4.

1947 — Passenger ship Wanganella runs aground on Barrett Reef, Wellington.

1948 — A National Airways Corporation (NAC) Dakota aircraft lands at Taieri airfield with a consignment of stud rams, the first stock transported by air. The journey from Paraparaumu took just 3hr 15min, compared to between three and five days by land transport.

1966 — Indira Gandhi is elected India’s prime minister and pledges to follow a path of nonalignment in world affairs. Gandhi succeeded Lal Shastri, who died on January 11. Shastri succeeded Gandhi’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru.

1967 — Nineteen miners die in an explosion at the Strongman coal mine near Greymouth.

1969 — Student Jan Palach dies after

setting himself on fire three days earlier in Prague’s Wenceslas Square in protest of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia five months earlier. His funeral turns into another major protest.

1974 — Five Russians, including a senior diplomat and two other members of the Soviet embassy staff, are expelled from China for espionage.

1975 — Twenty people are injured at France’s ParisOrly Airport in a battle after Arab gunmen attempted a grenade attack on an El Al jumbo jet and then seized three hostages.

1978 — The last Volkswagen Beetle made in Germany leaves VW’s plant in Emden. Production of the Beetle continued in Latin America until 2003.

1981 — The US and Iran sign an agreement leading to the release of 52 Americans held hostage for more than 14 months.

1983 — Klaus Barbie, notorious SS chief of Lyon in Nazioccupied France, is arrested in Bolivia; dubbed the Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, is announced.

1986 — Reportedly to deter unauthorised copying of software, the first IBM PC computer virus is released.

1987 — Dennis Conner’s Stars and Stripes team beats New Zealand’s KZ7 in the America’s Cup challenger final off Fremantle.

1995 — Pope John Paul II beatifies Mother Mary MacKillop before a crowd of 120,000 at Randwick Racecourse in Sydney.

2012 — Six years after it announced plans for a controversial $2 billion wind farm on the Lammermoor Ranges, and after spending $8.9 million in planning, Meridian Energy scraps the plan it called Project Hayes, saying it was a ‘‘prudent commercial decision’’; a series of strong earthquakes is felt throughout the lower South Island, the strongest, at 5.8 magnitude, striking at 7.48pm at a depth of 12km, 220km west of Invercargill and 390km west of Dunedin. No major damage was reported.

2013 — A magnitude4.7 earthquake strikes the Wellington area at 5am, and at 9.15pm Christchurch is shaken by a magnitude4.6 earthquake, the largest aftershock to strike the city in six months. No major damage is reported.