Sept 19 in History
1876 — The first carpet sweeper is patented by Melville Bissell of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
1881 — James A Garfield, 49, the 20th president of the US, dies of wounds inflicted by assassin Charles J Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C., on July 2. Garfield had only taken office on March 4.
1893 — New Zealand becomes the first selfgoverning country in the world to grant women the right to vote. It is the result of years of effort by suffrage campaigners, led by Kate Sheppard. They vote for the first time in the elections held on November 28.Women in SA get the vote in 1930.
1915 — Elizabeth Stern, Canadian pathologist, is born in Cobalt, Ontario. She first publishes a case report linking a specific virus to a specific cancer.
1934 — Richard Hauptmann is arrested in New York City and charged with the kidnap-murder of 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh jnr, son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne from Highfields, New Jersey, on March 1 1932. Despite them paying the $50,000 ransom, the infant’s body was found on May 12 in woods 6.4km from the family’s home. Hauptmann is executed by electric chair on April 3 1936, insisting he was innocent till the very end.
1948 — Jeremy Irons, English actor (“The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, “Reversal of Fortune”), is born in Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
1949 — Twiggy (Dame Lesley Lawson, née Hornby), English model, actress and singer, is born in Neasden, Middlesex. She is one of the first international supermodels and a fashion icon of the 1960s.
1972 — A Black September letter bomb kills Ami Shehori, an agricultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in London — 14 days after their attack on the Israeli team quarters at the Munich Olympics.
1982 — Prof Scott Elliott Fahlman of Carnegie Mellon University posts the first online smiley faces or emoticons :-) and :-( in a message to an electronic bulletin board during a discussion about the limits of online humour and how to distinguish serious posts from jokes.
1983 — St Kitts and Nevis (officially known as the Federation of Saint Christopher and Nevis) gains independence from the UK, but opts to remain within the Commonwealth. The island country in the West Indies is the smallest sovereign state in the Western Hemisphere, in both area (261km²) and population (53,199).
1985 — The Mexico City area is struck by the first (8.1) of two devastating earthquakes — a 7.5 aftershock follows on the 20th — that claims 9,500 lives, with some 40,000 people injured.