On this day

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.

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

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, who replaced Richard Nixon in 1974, died at his home in California, aged 93.