Significant and interesting snippets of news, with a South African angle, from this day in history
1510 In Berlin, Prussia, 38 people are burned alive at the stake – their crime: being Jewish.
1545 King Henry VIII’s pride and joy, the warship Mary Rose, sinks off Portsmouth. The wreck is salvaged in 1982 in one of the most complex projects in maritime archaeology.
1553 Lady Jane Grey, 15, is replaced by Mary (Bloody Mary) as Queen of England after only nine days on the throne. Locked up in the tower of London, she is executed.
1845 The last great fire to affect Manhattan kills four firefighters, 26 civilians, and destroys 345 buildings.
1877 Englishman Spencer Gore, 27, wins the first Wimbledon Men’s Tennis title.
1879 Legendary Wild West gunfighter Doc Holliday, who stood with Wyatt Earp during the ‘Gunfight at the OK Corral’, kills for the first time after a man shoots up his saloon.
1903 Maurice Garin wins the first Tour de France cycle event.
1912 A meteorite of about 190kg explodes over Holbrook, Arizona, causing 16 000 pieces of debris to rain down on the town.
1940 Buoyed by success, Adolph Hitler promotes 12 generals to field marshal owing to military achievements in Europe.
1977 The world’s first GPS signal is transmitted.
1979 The oil tanker SS Atlantic Empress hits another oil tanker in the Caribbean, causing the largest ship-borne oil spill (287 000 tons).
1981 Wynand Claassen’s Springbok rugby tourists arrive in New Zealand. They play their first match at Gisborne three days later.
1985 A dam collapses, killing 268 people in Val di Stava, Italy.
2009 The Wesley Impact: a black spot is discovered on Jupiter soon after an object hits the planet and leaves an impact area about the size of the Pacific Ocean. The explosion was a million times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. A 2003 paper estimated comets with a diameter larger than 1.5km strikes Jupiter every 90 to 500 years,
2014 Gunmen in Egypt attack a military checkpoint, killing 21 soldiers.
2019 The UK oil tanker Stena Impero is seized by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards in the Strait of Hormuz.