NOW & THEN
1 JANUARY
45BC: The Julian calendar took
effect.
404AD: The last gladiator competition took place in Rome.
1502: Portuguese navigators discovered Rio de Janeiro.
1610: German astronomer Simon Marius discovered Jupiter’s moons but did not officially report it. Galileo did so on 1 July, 1610.
1651: Charles II was crowned King of Scots at Scone. It was the last coronation in Scotland.
1660: Samuel Pepys wrote the first words in his diary, using a system of shorthand. He kept diaries for ten years.
1700: Protestant western Europe, with the exception of England, began using the Gregorian calendar.
1760: Carron Ironworks near Falkirk was started by Roebuck & Garbett of Birmingham and Cadell of Cockenzie. Small naval guns known as carronades were among the company’s products.
1772: First travellers’ cheques sold in London, which could be used in 90 European cities.
1783: Glasgow Chamber of Commerce was founded, the first in Britain.
1785: The Daily Universal Register was founded. It became the Times on 1 January 1788.
1801: The Irish parliament voted to join Great Britain, thus forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
1804: Haiti gained independence from France.
1818: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, was published anonymously in London.
1833: Britain proclaimed sovereignty over the Falklands.
1863: Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves free.
1904: The first motor vehicle registration number in Britain, A1, was secured for his Napier car by Earl Russell.
1909: Thousands of Britons over 70 went to post offices to draw their first weekly pension of five shillings (25p).
1913: Film censorship came into operation in the UK.
1919: Britain’s worst peacetime naval disaster, when the yacht Iolaire, carrying 260 Lewis men returning from war, and 24 crew, struck a reef on approach to Stornoway Harbour. Within 20 yards of the shore, 205 men died as the vessel foundered.
1923: Most Scottish railways merged into the LMS and LNER. The Caledonian Railway followed suit later in the year.
1947: Britain’s coal industry nationalised.
1951: Steel industry nationalised.
1958: The European Economic Community came into being, the Treaty of Rome having been signed on 25 November, 1957, by six countries.
1959: Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba.
1961: Birth control pill was first used in Britain.
1964: The first Top Of The Pops was aired.
1970: Age of majority in Britain reduced from 21 to 18.
1973: Britain, Ireland and Denmark became EEC members.
1995: Fred West, awaiting trial for 12 murders in and near Gloucester, hanged himself in prison.