TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY is Tuesday, August 2, the 214th day of 2022. There are 151 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1802 — Napoleon Bonaparte, of France, is declared consul for life, giving him the power to name his successor.
1830 — King Charles X of France abdicates after three days of an uprising in Paris.
1838 — French whaling captain Jean Langlois negotiates the purchase of
Banks Peninsula from local Maori for 1000 francs.
1851 — A prospectus is issued for the Otago Banking Company.
1865 — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is published in England.
1907 — Lytteltonborn rower Billy Webb defeats Australian George Towns on the Parramatta River in Sydney, in the world sculling championships.
1934 — Germany’s president, Paul
von Hindenburg, dies aged 87, opening the way for Adolf Hitler to become dictator.
1935 — Britain passes the
Government of India Act, which reforms the governmental system, separates Burma and Aden from India, grants provincial governments greater selfgovernment and creates a central legislature in New Delhi.
1939 — Albert Einstein, concerned that the Nazis are working on powerful bombs using uranium, writes to US president Franklin Roosevelt urging him to start an atomic project.
1940 — New Zealand’s war cabinet approves the establishment of a Home Guard. By the end of the war, more than 100,000 men will have volunteered; Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, gives the Eagle Day directive to destroy British air power in order to pave the way for an invasion of Britain.
1942 — The second major earthquake in six weeks, measuring 7 on the Richter scale, strikes the Wellington, Wairarapa and Manawatu region. It causes extensive damage and comes just five weeks after a magnitude7.2 earthquake rocked the lower North Island.
1943 — A cargo plane carrying Japanese internee families crashes on takeoff from Whenuapai with the loss of 15 lives; US navy patrol torpedo boat PT109, commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, sinks after being sheared in two by a Japanese destroyer off the Solomon Islands. Kennedy was credited with saving members of the crew.
1945 — The Potsdam Conference ends with Harry S. Truman, Joseph Stalin and Clement Attlee in agreement on the
demilitarisation and division of Germany.
1970 — The British army uses rubber bullets for the first time to quell a riot in Northern Ireland.
1985— A Delta Airlines Tristar airliner crashes on its final approach to Dallas/ Fort Worth Airport, killing 133 people.
1989 — Trade restrictions between Britain and Argentina are lifted for the first time since the 1982 Falklands War.
1994 — Chloe Reeves, who became affectionately known to New Zealanders as Chloe of Wainuiomata, takes the country by storm when featured in one of Gary McCormick’s Heartland television documentaries.
1999 — In India, 285 people die when two trains crash headon in predawn darkness near Gaisal, about 500km north of Calcutta.
2001 — Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic is jailed for 46 years for the murder of thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica massacre, Europe’s worst atrocity since World War 2.
2002 — Kazakh authorities sentence Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, a founding member of the reform movement Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DCK), to seven years in prison for corruption and abuse of power.
2017 — More than a billion people around the world need glasses and 36 million are blind, according to new study published in The Lancet.
2018 — The oldest library in Germany is confirmed unearthed in Cologne, dating to AD2. It possibly held 20,000 scrolls.