The Times On This Day: Facts and trivia for every day of the year. James Owen
rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_e0336fe0-6772-5b22-b0c9-e58eb067365e">20 FEBRUARY
1632 Thomas Osborne (1st Duke of Leeds), statesman and leader of the Tories who was imprisoned twice on charges of bribery, was born.
•
1811 Austria declared itself bankrupt because of the cost of fighting Napoleon.
•
1816 the opening night of Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville was a fiasco, with one performer singing an aria with a bleeding nose after tripping on a trapdoor, and a cat attacking another during the finale to the first act.
•
1947 Viscount Mountbatten of Burma was appointed last viceroy of India.
•
1962 John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
1741 Jethro Tull, inventor of the more efficient horse-drawn seed-drill, died at Hungerford, Berks.
•
1862 Nathaniel Gordon became the only American to be executed for slave trading, their shipping being illegal under the 1820 Piracy Act.
•
1916 the ten-month-long Battle of Verdun began with nine hours of the heaviest artillery bombardment ever witnessed.
•
1964 24,000 rolls of Beatles wallpaper were flown to America.
•
1965 Malcolm X was assassinated in New York aged 39 by three members of the Nation of Islam.
•
1972 President Nixon began his historic visit of rapprochement to China.
1878 Frank Woolworth opened his first store in Utica, New York.
•
1897 Blondin (Jean-François Gravelet), acrobat and tightrope walker known for his crossing of Niagara Falls, died at Ealing, London, aged 72.
•
1907 taxi cabs with meters were introduced in London.
•
1928 Bert Hinkler completed the first solo flight from England to Australia, landing in Darwin having taken off from Croydon 15 days earlier.
•
1946 Dr Selman Abraham Waksman announced his discovery of the antibiotic streptomycin.
•
2006 £53 million was discovered to have been stolen from a Securitas depot in Kent, in Britain’s biggest robbery.
1633 Samuel Pepys, diarist, was born in London.
•
1820 the Cato Street Conspiracy, a plot to assassinate the entire British cabinet, was uncovered.
•
1821 John Keats, poet, died in Rome of tuberculosis aged 25.
•
1874 Major Walter Clopton Wingfield patented his new game of lawn tennis.
•
1889 Victor Fleming, director whose films included Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939), was born in California.
•
1905 the world’s first Rotary Club was founded in Chicago.
•
1997 it was announced that Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep, had been born.
1582 Pope Gregory XIII published a papal bull that established a new-style (Gregorian) calendar, but it took England almost 200 years to follow suit.
•
1848 the last king of France, Louis-Philippe, who had reigned since 1830, was forced to abdicate by revolutionaries who then proclaimed the Second Republic.
•
1920 US-born MP Nancy Astor became the first woman to speak in the House of Commons.
•
1923 the Flying Scotsman entered service with the London and North Eastern Railway.
•
2001 Claude Shannon, mathematician whose work on modern information theory laid the basis for the information age, died.
1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I.
•
1836 Samuel Colt was granted a patent for his revolver.
•
1862 a paper currency known as Greenbacks was introduced in the US by order of President Abraham Lincoln.
•
1868 Andrew Johnson, 17th American president, was impeached, to be acquitted the following May by a single vote.
•
1952 the Windscale plutonium plant at Sellafield began operation.
•
1964 floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) won the world heavyweight boxing championship when Sonny Liston failed to come out for the seventh round.
1797 the Bank of England issued £1 banknotes for the first time.
•
1815 Napoleon escaped from exile in Elba.
•
1848 The Communist Manifesto was published, having been printed in London.
•
1924 Adolf Hitler appeared in court, charged with treason for leading the failed coup d’état known as the beer-hall putsch.
•
1935 a Heyford bomber flying in the main beam of a BBC short-wave transmitter gave back reflected signals to the ground, winning Robert Watson-Watt government approval to develop radar technology.
•
1936 Hitler opened the first factory to manufacture the Volkswagen, the people’s car.
c. 272 Constantine the Great, Roman emperor 306–337, was born in modern Nis, Serbia.
•
1814 Beethoven’s 8th Symphony received its premiere in Vienna.
•
1879 at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, Constantin Fahlberg and Ira Remsen