ON THIS DAY, JUNE 8

452 Italy is invaded by Attila the Hun, one of Europe’s most feared enemies.

632 Muhammad, the founder of Islam, dies in Medina. He is viewed as the final prophet of God in all the main branches of Islam.

1783 Laki, a volcano in Iceland, begins an 8-month eruption that kills about 10 000 people and starts a widespread 7-year famine throughout Asia and Europe.

1786 Commercially made ice cream is first

advertised, in New York.

1794 Robespierre inaugurates the French Revolution’s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being.

1824 The washing machine is patented, in Quebec.

1856 A group of 194 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty, arrives at Norfolk Island for resettlement.

1938 Schoolboy Gert Terblanche discovers fossils of an unknown “robust-type” human ancestor, named Paranthropus robustus, at Kromdraai, near Sterkfontein.

1942 Japanese submarines shell Sydney and Newcastle, Australia.

1943 The two-day Battle of Porta between the Royal Italian Army and the Greek People’s Liberation Army begins with 250 Greek partisans overcoming the odds against 5 000

Italian soldiers backed by air cover.

1949 George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is published.

1972 Phan Thị Kim Phúc, 9, is burnt by napalm. An AP photographer snaps her moments later running down a road. The image becomes an iconic, Pulitzer Prizewinning photo.

1982 Argentinian air attacks on British landing ships kill 56 servicemen.

1986 Amid controversy, alleged Nazi Kurt Waldheim, a former UN secretary-general, is elected president of Austria.

1992 World Oceans Day is first marked. 1995 Downed US Air Force pilot Captain Scott O’Grady is rescued by US Marines in Bosnia.

2018 The world’s most powerful supercomputer, Summit, which can process 200 000 trillion calculations a second, is unveiled. | THE HISTORIAN