May 5 in History
1260 — Kublai Khan becomes ruler of the Mongol Empire. He reigns until his death on February 18 1294 at age 78.
1818 — Karl Marx, German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary, is born in Trier, Prussia.
1821 — Napoleon Bonaparte, 51, military leader and former emperor of France, dies on the island of St Helena where he had been living in exile since 1815. 1835 — The first railway line in continental Europe opens between Brussels and Mechelen in Belgium, a country heavily involved in the early development of railway transport.
1861 — Peter Cooper Hewitt, electrical engineer and inventor of the first mercury-vapour lamp (a great advance in electrical lighting) in 1901, is born in NYC. 1889 — Herbie Taylor, South African cricketer and soldier, is born in Durban. He plays 42 Tests for SA between 1912 and 1932, scoring 2,936 runs at an average of 40.77. With World War 1 putting all sport on hold — Taylor served 18 months in the Royal Field Artillery and two years in the Royal Flying Corps and won the Military Cross — he holds the record for longest time spent as Test captain, taking charge of his first Test on December 13 1913 and his last on August 16 1924, a period of 10 years and 251 days. 1891 — The Music Hall in NYC, designed by William Burnet Tuthill and built by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, has its grand opening, with Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as guest conductor. It is renamed Carnegie Hall in 1893 after board members of the Music Hall Company of New York persuade Carnegie to allow the use of his name. 1912 — The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda begins publishing. It is now run by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, whereas the online Pravda.ru is privately owned and has international editions published in Russian, English, French and Portuguese.
1961 — Astronaut Alan Bartlett Shepard jnr, a Navy commander, becomes the first American in space with a 15-minute, 22-second suborbital flight in a Mercury-Redstone 3 capsule, which he named Freedom 7. Launched from Cape Canaveral, he reaches a maximum speed of 8,336.4km/h and an altitude of 187.4km. Within 11 minutes of splashdown in the western Atlantic Ocean, Shepard and Freedom 7 are retrieved by a helicopter from the USS Lake Champlain and flown to the recovery ship.
1981 — Provisional Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands, 27, elected member of the British Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone on April 9, dies at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland on his 66th day without food.