Events that ripple though time, some of which may tickle your fancy, or event your funny bone
1629 English King Charles I dissolves Parliament for the fourth time in his reign, summons new Parliament 11 years later, only to be dissolved after three months.
1791 John Stone of Concord, Massachusetts, patents a pile driver.
1876 First telephone call: Alexander Graham Bell says “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” to his assistant Thomas Watson.
1880 The Salvation Army is formed in the US. The social service organisation was first launched in England and operates in 90 countries, including South Africa.
1896 After Bob Fitzsimmons KOs the much larger Jim Corbett to win the world heavyweight championship, in Carson City, Nevada, he laconically mutters the line first coined by fellow boxer ‘Jersey’ Joe Walcott: “The bigger they are, the harder they fall.”
1906 Baker Street & Waterloo Railway opens, constructed by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. The contraction Bakerloo became the name in July 1906.
1906 A blast in France kills 1 099 miners.
1922 Striking white workers storm and occupy police stations, railway installations and mines on the Rand. Within four days the revolt is crushed, but at the cost of 153 lives, with another 534 people injured.
1948 First civilian to exceed speed of sound is Herb H Hoover, at Edwards Air Force Base, California.
1970 With a team packed with the likes of Mike Procter, Barry Richards, Eddie Barlow, the Pollock brothers, John Traicos, and Lee Irvine, South Africa gives the visiting Australia cricket team a 4-0 series drubbing.
1978 Percy Qoboza, editor of the banned newspaper The World, is released from detention, along with nine other black leaders who were seized in October 1976.
2010 Mexican Carlos Slim becomes the first person from an emerging economy to top the Forbes Richest Person list, with a net worth of $53.5 billion. Currently, the richest of 3 200 billionaires (collectively worth $12.2 trillion) is Bernard Arnault & family ($231bn). The top 10 own more than 3.1bn people. The US has the most billionaires, with 735. China (including Hong Kong and Macau) has 562, followed by India with 169. The continent with the fewest is Africa, with Mzansi claiming the most (5). South Africa’s richest, Johann Rupert and family, is only the 157th richest world-wide, but is still worth a staggering $11.1bn.
2023 Gary Lineker, the BBC’s highest-paid presenter, is suspended for tweeting on the UK government’s immigration policy, calling it an “immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the ‘30s”.
2023 Xi Jinping is appointed to a historic third term as President of China. Before that, the presidency had been restricted to two terms.
