ON THIS DAY SEPTEMBER 27
1066 William the Conqueror and his army set sail from the mouth of the River Somme, beginning the Norman conquest of England. 1590 Pope Urban VII dies 13 days after being chosen as pope, making his reign the shortest. 1672 A British company obtains the monopoly for the slave trade from Africa.
1801 Russian inventor Yefim Artamonov presents the world’s first bicycle to the Russian emperor, Alexander I, in St Petersburg. To get there from his native town, he has to cover 1 600km using his invention.
1886 Henry Brown Marshall asks Kidger Tucker to plan a new residential area for Johannesburg even before the planning of the mining camp was completed, thus Marshalltown is actually older than the city. 1900 The policy of using concentration camps during the Anglo-boer War is officially sanctioned by Lord Roberts.
1912 WC Handy publishes Memphis Blues, considered the first blues song.
1924 The Odessa to Moscow Express is attacked by bandits and most of the passengers are either killed or injured. It is the second attack in two weeks.
1939 Poland surrenders to Germany after 26 days of fighting.
1956 USAF Captain Milburn Apt becomes the first man to go three times faster than the speed of sound, exceeding Mach 3 while flying the Bell X-2. Shortly after, the craft goes out of control and he is killed.
1959 A typhoon kills 5 000 people in Japan. 1965 Dr Margaret Roach (Killie) Campbell, 84, collector of Africana, dies in Durban.
1968 The stage musical Hair opens at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London, where it gives 1 998 performances until its closure is forced by the roof collapsing in July 1973.
1998 The Google internet search engine retroactively claims this date as its birthday. 1999 Twenty-six elderly tourists from Britain and a South African tour guide are killed in a bus accident near Lydenburg.
2005 Controversial mining magnate Brett Kebble is shot dead in Melrose, Joburg.
2008 Astronaut Zhai Zhigang becomes the first Chinese person to perform a spacewalk while on Shenzhou 7. | THE HISTORIAN