NOW & THEN
23 JULY
776 BC: The first Olympic Games opened in Olympia.
1148: The Crusaders attacked Damascus.
1595: Spanish landed in Cornwall and burned Mousehole and Penzance.
1637: During a presbyterian riot in St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, Jenny Geddes cried out: “Dost thou say Mass in my lug?” and threw her chair at the pulpit.
1745: Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender”, landed on Eriskay.
1759: Work started on the Royal Navy’s 104-gun battleship Victory at Chatham, Kent. She was constructed from the wood of 2,200 oak trees.
1829: William Austin Burt patented the first typewriter.
1881: The Federation Internationale de Gymnastique, the world’s oldest international sporting federation, was forned.
1903: The Ford Motor Company sold its first car.
1904: The first ice-cream cone was made by Charles Menches in Missouri.
1914: Austria and Hungary issued ultimatum to Serbia after assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
1920: British East Africa was renamed Kenya and became British Crown colony.
1921: The Chinese Communist party was formed.
1926: Fox Film bought the patents for Movietone system for recording sound on to film.
1940: The Local Defence Volunteers were renamed by Winston Churchill as the Home Guard.
1940: The London blitz began with an all-night German air raid.
1955: Donald Campbell broke the world water speed record on Ullswater when he reached 202.32mph in Bluebird.
1958: The first four women were named to the peerage in the House of Lords.
1962: The first live Europe to USA television pictures were broadcast, via Telstar.
1963: The Beatles released their single She Loves You.
1973: President Richard Nixon refused to release tapes of conversations at the White House as part of the Watergate investigation.
1986: Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson in Westminster Abbey.
1991: Sellafield, Cumbria, was chosen by Nirex as site for deep underground depository for lowlevel radioactive nuclear waste.
1994: Space Shuttle Columbia 17 landed after a record 14 days, 55 minutes.
1995: Comet Hale-bopp was discovered.
1995: Miguel Indurain of Spain won his fifth consecutive Tour de France title.
1999: ANA flight 61, with 508 passengers on board, was hijacked shortly after taking off from Tokyo by a man wielding a kitchen knife. He fatally stabbed the captain and took over the controls before eventually being subdued.
2005: Three terrorist bombs killed 88 people in the Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-sheikh.
2008: Canoeist John Darwin, who faked his own drowning in 2002, was jailed for more than six years for a £250,000 insurance fraud.