June 3 in History
1083 — Henry IV of Germany storms Rome and captures St Peter’s Basilica.
1726 — James Hutton, Scottish geologist (father of modern geology), is born in Edinburgh.
1769 — British navigator Captain James Cook, astronomer Charles Green, naturalist Joseph Banks and Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander observe and record a transit of Venus across the Sun on the island of Tahiti during Cook’s first voyage around the world. 1839 — In Humen, China, Lin Tse-hsü destroys
1.2 million kg of opium confiscated from British merchants — 500 workers labouring for 23 days to mix it with lime and salt and throw it into the sea. It becomes a trigger for the First Opium War.
1841 — Nicolas Appert, 91, French chef and inventor of airtight food preservation, dies in Massy. He won 12 000 francs offered by Napoleon for developing a method to conserve food for travelling. His canning method took 14 years to develop, starting in 1795, and used glass jars sealed with wax reinforced with wire. 1906 — Josephine Baker, dancer, singer, Parisian nightclub owner, is born in St Louis, Missouri.
1934 — Dr Frederick Banting, co-discoverer of insulin (with Dr Charles Best), is knighted. He receives the Nobel Prize at age 32 and remains the youngest Nobel laureate in the area of Physiology/Medicine. 1936 — Colin Meads, New Zealand rugby player
(55 tests), is born in Cambridge, Waikato.
1950 — Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal of the French Annapurna expedition reach the 8 091m summit of Annapurna I in the Himalayas in Nepal. With considerable help from their team they return alive, albeit with severe injuries following frostbite. 1962 — Air France Flight 007 overruns the runway at Orly Airport, Paris, and explodes when the crew attempts to abort takeoff, killing 122 passengers and eight crew members — the first single civilian jetairliner disaster with more than 100 deaths. Two flight attendants, seated in the back of the aircraft, survive. 1966 — Wasim Akram, Pakistan cricketer (104 tests, 356 ODIs), is born in Lahore.
1973 — A Soviet supersonic Tupolev 144 explodes at the Paris Air Show at Goussainville, Val-d’Oise. It crashes into nearby houses, killing the six people on board and eight on the ground. It is witnessed by
225 000 people, including designer Alexei Tupolev. 1986 — Rafael Nadal (Parera), 16-time Grand Slam tennis champion, is born in Manacor, Mallorca.
1989 — Chinese troops enter Beijing, reaching Tiananmen Square at about 1am on the 4th. They fire on civilians and students throughout the day, ending the demonstrations for a more democratic government that started on April 18. No official death toll has ever been released.