Feb 4 in History
1699 — Tsar Peter the Great executes 350 rebellious Streltsy (Russia’s elite military corps). 1797 — An 8.3 earthquake in Ecuador kills 41 000 people and destroys many cities and towns.
1809 — Louis Braille is born in Coupvray, France. Blinded at age three after an accident in his father’s workshop, he nevertheless becomes an accomplished organist and cellist and in 1819 wins a scholarship to the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. At 15, Louis witnesses a demonstration by Charles Barbier, a soldier who had invented “night writing”, letters embossed on cardboard for silent communication along trenches. Braille simplifies and adapts this to a six-dot code representing letters that enables people with impaired vision to read and write. The first Braille book is published in 1927, but Braille dies of tuberculosis at age 43 — before his system gains widespread acceptance. 1875 — Ludwig Prandtl, physicist (father of aerodynamics), is born in Freising, Germany.
1902 — Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic (1927), is born in Detroit. 1906 — Clyde Tombaugh, astronomer who discovers Pluto in 1930, is born in Streator, Illinois. 1920 — Two South African pilots, Lieutenant Colonel Pierre van Ryneveld and Captain Quintin Brand, set out in a Vickers Vimy from Brooklands, Surrey, on the first flight between the UK and South Africa. They arrive safely in Heliopolis but are forced to land on their way to Wadi Halfa due to engine overheating. Another Vimy is loaned to them by the RAF at Heliopolis. They continue to Bulawayo where the aircraft crashes on takeoff. They borrow an Airco DH.9 and arrive in Cape Town after 45 days with a total flight time of 109.5 hours. Both Van Ryneveld and Brand are knighted. 1974 — Newspaper heiress Patty Hearst, 19, is kidnapped by a left-wing urban guerrilla group. 1983 — Singer-musician Karen Carpenter, 32, dies from heart failure brought on by years of suffering from anorexia nervosa. Acclaimed for her contralto vocals and her drumming, she and her brother Richard burst onto the music scene in 1969 as the duo the Carpenters. Her death increases awareness of eating disorders.
2006 — Zoliswa Nkonyana, 19, is murdered only metres from home in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. A group of about 20 young men stab, club, kick and beat her to death for living openly as a lesbian. Five of the nine men charged for her murder are found not guilty in September 2011. On February 1 2012 the other four are sentenced to 18 years in prison (minus four years they’d already spent in jail).