NOW & THEN
30 SEPTEMBER
1399: King Richard II of England abdicated.
1555: The Bishop of Oxford, Nicholas Ridley, was sentenced to death as a heretic.
1791: Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute first performed in Vienna.
1808: Theatreroyal, Covent Garden, destroyed by fire.
1868: Queen Isabella of Spain was deposed and fled to France.
1888: Jack the Ripper murdered two more women, Liz Stride and Kate Eddowes, in London.
902: Artificial silk was first patented, as “rayon”.
1911: World’s first flying stuntman, Lieutenant HH Arnold, performed flying sequence in The Military Air Scout in New York.
1922: Benito Mussolini formed first Fascist government in Italy.
1928: Discovery of penicillin by Ayrshire-born Sir Alexander Fleming was announced.
1928: Leon Vanderstuyft of Belgium cycled a record 76 miles 604 yards in 1 hr.
1929: BBC made the first experimental television broadcast.
1929: Maiden flight of the first rocket-powered aircraft, designed by German engineer Fritz von Opel.
1935: George Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess premiered in Boston.
1935: The Hoover Dam, situated astride the border between the US states of Arizona and Nevada, was dedicated by president Franklin D Roosevelt.
1936: Pinewood Studios opened near Iver, Buckinghamshire.
1938: On his return from Munich prime minister Neville Chamberlain told a crowd at Heston Airport, London: “I believe it is peace in our time.”
1939: Pact agreeing on partition of Poland was signed by Germany and USSR.
1939: A British Expeditionary Force of 158,000 men was sent to France.
1946: International military tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, found 22 Nazi leaders guilty of war crimes. Eleven were sentenced to death.
1949: The Berlin Airlift, an operation by British and US aircraft to bring in food and supplies to beat the blockade of the city by Russian troops, ended after 277,000 flights.
1958: French Guinee became the independent republic of Guinea.
1965: Judge Elizabeth Lane was sworn in to become Britain’s first female High Court Judge.
1966: Botswana (formerly Bechuanaland) gained independence from Britain.
1967: BBC’S Radio 1 went on the air for the first time.
1971: United States and Soviet Union signed pacts designed to avoid accidental nuclear war.
1992: A smaller, lighter 10p coin was introduced in Britain.
1994: Aldwych tube station of the London Underground closed after 88 years service.
1999: Japan’s second worst nuclear accident occurred at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokai-mura, northeast of Tokyo.
2005: Controversial drawings of Muhammad were printed in Danish newspaper Jyllandsposten.
2009: An earthquake in Sumatra killed more than 1,100 people.