NOW & THEN
12 JANUARY
1809: Britain took Cayenne, French Guiana from France and retained it until 1814.
1820: The Royal Astronomical society was founded.
1836: HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin on board, reached Sydney, Australia.
1866: The Royal Aeronautical Society was founded.
1879: Lieutenant-general Chelmsford invaded Zululand as the British-zulu War began in Africa.
1895: The National Trust was founded.
1896: The first X-ray photograph was made in the United States. Doctor Henry Louis Smith fired a bullet into a corpse and then took an exposure which, when developed, showed the exact location of the bullet.
1906: Sir Henry Campbell-bannerman’s cabinet, including Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill, embarked on sweeping social reforms following a Liberal landslide in the general election.
1916: The fighting tank was first tested and given official approval by British top brass. The army ordered 49.
1948: The first full-size supermarket opened in Britain, the London Co-op at Manor Park.
1950: British submarine Truculent sank in a Thames collision with the loss of 65 lives.
1958: Soviet Union proposed a zone free of nuclear weapons from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean.
1959: Henry Cooper became the British and European heavyweight boxing champion when he defeated Brian London on points over 15 rounds.
1982: Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings seized power in Ghana.
1986: Tamil separatist guerrillas killed seven Sri Lanka army soldiers and wounded nine others in an ambush in the northern province of Sri Lanka.
1987: Prince Edward resigned from the Royal Marines.
1988: Soldiers and Palestinian crowds disrupted UN officials’ attempts to inspect Gaza Strip’s crowded refugee camps.
1990: Romania’s interim president, Ion Iliescu, announced the extinction of the Communist Party in that country.
1995: It was announced that troops were being withdrawn from daylight patrols in Belfast for the first time for 25 years.
1996: The bodies of 8,000 Muslims were found buried in an open-cast mine in Ljubija, in northern Bosnia.
1998: Nineteen European nations agreed to forbid human cloning.
2002: The Buttery, one of Glasgow's best restaurants for more than a century, ceased trading.
2004: The world’s largest ocean liner, RMS Queen Mary 2, made its maiden voyage.
2006: Turkey released Mehmet Ali Agca from jail after he served 25 years for shooting Pope John Paul II.
2009: Kate Winslet won two awards at the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, winning best actress for Revolutionary Road and best supporting actress for The Reader.
2010: A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck in Port-auprince, the capital of Haiti, leaving 200,000 dead.