ON THIS DAY MARCH 1

743 Slave export by Christians to heathen areas is prohibited.

1260 Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis, conquers Damascus.

1562 The French Wars of Religion start with the massacre of 63 Huguenots in Wassy.

1849 The Cape Agulhas lighthouse begins operating.

1854 The SS City of Glasgow leaves Liverpool with 480 passengers and crew never to be seen again.

1872 Yellowstone in the US becomes the world’s first national park.

1873 Remington and Sons begin production of the first practical typewriter.

1910 An avalanche buries a railway train in Washington state, killing 96 people.

1921 Warwick Armstrong’s Australian cricket team becomes the first to complete a whitewash of The Ashes. It would not be repeated for 86 years.

1893 Electrical engineer Nikola Tesla gives the first public demonstration of radio.

1939 A Japanese ammunition dump explodes at Hirakata, Osaka, Japan, killing 94 people.

1951 Pilots Doug Mckellar and “Dizzy” Deans of the SA Air Force’s No 2 Squadron, locate seven trucks hidden in hilly terrain and divebomb the target with napalm – a procedure used for the first time by the squadron. The “Flying Cheetahs” were assisting the UN in the Korean War and had a high attrition rate because of the nature of their missions, which were flown in outmoded piston-engined

F-51D Mustangs.

1953 Soviet premier Joseph Stalin has a stroke, collapses and dies four days later.

New evidence suggests he was poisoned to avoid nuclear war with the US.

1975 Jody Scheckter wins the Kyalami Grand Prix in his Tyrrell Cosworth. He is only the second South African-born driver to win his home grand prix, after Buller Meyer in 1938.

1983 The first collection of 12 Swatch models is introduced in Zürich, Switzerland

1988 A Bop Air plane explodes over Germiston, killing all 17 people aboard.

1998 Titanic became the first film to gross over $1 billion worldwide.

2002 The US invasion of Afghanistan begins. 2003 The International Criminal Court holds its inaugural session, in The Hague.

2003 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, organiser of the 9/11 attacks is captured in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

2004 Exiled Haitian president Jean-bertrand Aristide, speaking from Johannesburg, claims he was forced to leave Haiti by US military forces. | THE HISTORIAN