● Mar 10 in History
1893 — The New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now New Mexico State University) cancels its first graduation ceremony after its only graduate Sam Steel was robbed and killed the night before. Just 17 (he started college at age 13), he was delivering milk in the early morning hours when he was killed. A suspect, John Roper, is found guilty but released on appeal. Today, graduates of the College of Agriculture, Consumer, and Environmental Sciences are inducted into the Sam Steel Society. 1906 — A coal dust explosion kills 1,099 at Courrières, France. About 600 miners reach the surface during the hours immediately after the explosion; 13 survivors, later known as the rescapés, are found by rescuers on March 30; and one more on April 4. It is surpassed as the worst mining disaster in history by a gas and coal dust explosion at the Benxihu Colliery, in Liaoning, China, on April 26 1942 which kills 1,549 miners.
1922 — Mahatma Gandhi is arrested in India, tried for sedition and sentenced to six years in prison. He is released on February 4 1924 after an appendectomy. 1940 — Chuck (Carlos Ray) Norris, martial-arts expert, actor, is born in Oklahoma, US.
1947 — The Big Four (the foreign ministers of Britain, the US, Russia and France) meet in Moscow to discuss Germany.
1951 — FBI director J Edgar Hoover almost gets a job offer, that of Major League Baseball commissioner. Tigers owner Walter Briggs floats Hoover’s name as a possibility at a Lords of the Game meeting in Miami. However, he says, Hoover is doing such an excellent job that it would be a “grave mistake” to remove him. Hoover, appointed on May 10 1924, remains FBI boss until his death at 77 on May 2 1972.
1957 — Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, a founder al-Qaeda, is born in Riyadh, the son of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, the wealthiest nonroyal in Saudi Arabia.
1969 — James Earl Ray pleads guilty on his 41st birthday to the murder of Dr Martin Luther King jnr in Memphis on April 4 1968 and is sentenced to 99 years in jail. Ray later repudiates his plea.
1975 — Dog spectacles are patented in England.
1977 — Astronomers discover the rings of Uranus. 1988 — Pop singer Andy Gibb (youngest of the four Bee Gees brothers) dies in Oxford, England, of heart inflammation five days after his 30th birthday.
1988 — The Prince of Wales narrowly avoids death on the ski slopes of Switzerland in an avalanche that kills one of his closest friends. Major Hugh Lindsay, 34, is sent plunging 400m down the mountainside when tons of freshly fallen snow cascade down a mountain above the resort of Klosters.