TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Tuesday, February 2, the 33rd day of 2021. There are 332 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1709 — British sailor Alexander Selkirk is rescued after being marooned on a desert island for five years. His story was the inspiration behind Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe.
1853 — Edward Gibbon Wakefield arrives in Christchurch, and is met with hostility from disgruntled Canterbury settlers.
1864 — A fire breaks out in the premises of general merchants Messrs G. and H. Hart, near the top of Stafford St, Dunedin. Due to a lack of water it quickly spreads, causing widespread damage.
1878 — Dunedin telegraph office employee Alois Lubecki makes the first telephone call in New Zealand, from the Dunedin Telegraph Office to Charles Henry, in Milton. Within a short time telegraph poles and crossbars containing dozens of wires are erected across the country.
1892 — The bottle cap is patented by IrishAmerican mechanical engineer William Painter.
1901 — A crowd of 20,000 gathers at the grounds of the New Zealand Parliament to mourn Queen Victoria on the day of her funeral in London. Huge processions and ceremonies are held throughout the country and trains stop running for half an hour; Sir Edward William Stafford, three time New Zealand prime minister, dies aged 81.
1905 — A large crowd gathers in central Oamaru to witness the Governor, Lord Plunket, unveil the South African War Memorial.
1925 — Setting out from Nenana just over five days earlier, and covering some 1085km in harsh conditions with temperatures at 46degC, the first dog sled reaches Nome, Alaska with diphtheria
serum, saving the small town of Nome and the surrounding communities from a developing epidemic. The journey is the inspiration behind the annual Iditarod race.
1933 — Two days after becoming chancellor, Adolf Hitler dissolves the German Reichstag (Parliament).
1943 — The last organised German troops surrender to the Russians to conclude the five monthlong Battle of Stalingrad, that brought about more than 2 million casualties.
1973 — Richard Hadlee makes his debut in test cricket when New Zealand plays Pakistan at the Basin Reserve in Wellington. Hadlee went on to play 86 test matches and became the first international player to take 400 test wickets.
1974 — Labelled ‘‘the greatest middle distance race of all time’’, the men’s 1500m final run on the final day of the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch gave witness to an epic race between Tanzanian Filbert Bayi, Ben Jipcho (Kenya) and New Zealand’s John Walker and Rod Dixon, with both Bayi and Walker eclipsing the world record of American Jim Ryun of 3min 33.1sec set in 1967. Bayi running the first 800m in an astonishing 1min 52.2sec on his way to the gold medal in a new world record time of 3min 32.16sec, with Walker off his shoulder winning the silver medal in 3min 32.52sec. Third was Jipcho in 3min 33.16sec and Dixon fourth in 3min 33.52sec. 1982 — Coroner Gerry Galwin commits
Lindy Chamberlain to stand trial on a charge of murdering her 10weekold daughter, Azaria, who disappeared at Ayers Rock (now Uluru), central Australia, in August 1980.
1993 — Vaclav Havel becomes the first president of an independent Czech Republic, after the split with Slovakia.
1998 — A Cebu Pacific Air DC9 aircraft crashes in the southern Philippines, killing all 104 people on board.
1999 — Hugo Chavez takes office as Venezuela’s president, seven years after he tried to overthrow the Government in a military coup.
2006 — Foreign aid workers and journalists start leaving the Gaza Strip after masked Palestinian gunmen, incensed by cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in European newspapers, surround an EU office and threaten to attack Europeans.
2018 — All 955 miners are rescued from the Beatrix gold mine in the town of Welkom, South Africa, after two days underground.
2020 — A date marking a rare global palindrome. The date 02022020 reads the same forwards and backwards. The last time a date such as this occurred was November 11, 1111.