On this day

795: Leo III was elected to serve as Pope on the day his predecessor was buried and was consecrated the following day

1716: Thomas Gray, poet best known for his Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard, was born in London.

1791: Charles Babbage, English inventor of a calculating machine, was born. In 1823 he designed a machine which was the forerunner of the electronic computer.

1865: The first patent for a coffee percolator was filed by inventor James Nason in Massachusetts.

1891: Novelist Henry Miller, who wrote books Tropic Of Cancer and Tropic Of Capricorn, was born in New York.

1893: Mao Tse-tung (or Zedong), Chinese Communist revolutionary leader, was born in the Hunan province.

1898: Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium.

1906: The world’s first feature film, The Story Of The Kelly Gang, was screened in Melbourne. 1908: Jack Johnson became the first African-american boxer to win the world heavyweight title, knocking out Tommy Burns in Round 14 in Sydney, Australia.

1943: The German battleship Scharnhorst was sunk by the Royal Navy.

1974: American comedian

Jack Benny died.

2004: A giant 9.1-magnitude quake and tsunami killed 230,000 people in about a dozen nations across southern Asia.

2006: Former US president Gerald

Ford, pictured left, who replaced the disgraced Richard Nixon in 1974, died at his home in California, aged 93.

Birthdays

Jane Lapotaire, actress, 76; Dermot Murnaghan, pictured right, newscaster, 63; Lars Ulrich, drummer, 57; Jared Leto, actor, 49; Jerome “Geronimo” Le Banner, kickboxer, 48; Shane Meadows, filmmaker, 48; Chris Daughtry, musician, 41; Yohan Blake, sprinter, 31.