The UK Babe Channels Forum

1135 - England's King Henry I died. He had fallen ill seven days earlier after eating too many lampreys (jawless fish resembling eels). He was 66, and had ruled for 35 years.

1864 – In his State of the Union Address President Abraham Lincoln reaffirms the necessity of ending slavery as ordered ten weeks earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation.

1885 – First serving of the soft drink Dr Pepper at a drug store in Waco, Texas (United States).

1891 - James Naismith, a physical education teacher at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, created the indoor sport of basketball.

1913 – The Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line.

1918 – Iceland becomes a sovereign state, yet remains a part of the Danish kingdom.

1939 - The movie Gone With the Wind premiered in New York City.

1953 - The first issue of Playboy magazine was published by Hugh Hefner; it featured Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold.

1959 - Twelve countries, including the United States, signed a treaty setting aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, free from military activity.

1969 - A statue of former British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was unveiled in the House of Commons.

1981 – The AIDS virus is officially recognized.

1989 - Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Rome, ending 70 years of hostility between the Vatican and the USSR.

1990 - Britain and France were joined for the first time in thousands of years as the last wall of rock separating two halves of the Channel Tunnel was removed.

1999 - An international team of scientists announced it had virtually mapped a human chromosome.

1697 - The rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral, the work of Sir Christopher Wren, was opened. The previous cathedral had been destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

1769 - Britain's first cremation took place, in St. George's burial ground, London.

1804 – At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of the French, the first French Emperor in a thousand years.

1901 - King Camp Gillette patented a safety razor with a double-edged disposable blade.

1907 - The Professional Footballer’s Association was formed, after a meeting at the Imperial Hotel, Manchester.

1929 - Britain’s first 22 public telephone boxes came into service.

1942 – Manhattan Project: A team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

1971 – Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Fujairah, Sharjah, Dubai, and Umm Al Quwain form the United Arab Emirates.

1993 – Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is shot and killed in Medellín.

1995 - 28 year old Nick Leeson was sentenced for financial dealings which contributed to the fall of Barings Bank, Britain's oldest merchant bank. He admitted to a judge in Singapore two charges of fraud connected with Baring's £860m ruin.

1997 - Representatives of 41 countries met in London to discuss the whereabouts of gold and other valuable assets seized by the Nazi government from Jews in Germany and other occupied countries before and during World War II.

2001 - Enron filed for Chapter 11 protection in one of the largest corporate bankruptcies in U.S. history.

(02-12-2011 13:18 )skully Wrote: [ -> ]1901 - King Camp Gillette patented a safety razor with a double-edged disposable blade.

I don't know if the American version of “The Biggest Loser” is shown on TV over here but if it is, the mansion where it is filmed in Santa Monica was once owned by Gillette (and later by Bob Hope).

Born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin in 1855 and raised in Chicago, Illinois. King Camp Gillette's family was devastated by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. His ancestors came from England to Massachusetts in 1630.

While working as a salesman for the Crown Cork and Seal Company in the 1890s, Gillette saw bottle caps, with the cork seal he sold, thrown away after the bottle was opened. This made him recognize the value in basing a business on a product that was used a few times, then discarded. As existing, relatively expensive, razor blades dulled quickly and needed continuous sharpening, a razor whose blade could be thrown away when it dulled would meet a real need and likely be profitable.

Safety razors had been developed in the mid-19th century, but still used a forged blade. In the 1870s, the Kampfe Brothers introduced a type of razor along these lines. Gillette improved these earlier safety-razor designs, and introduced the high-profit-margin stamped razor blade steel blade. Gillette's razor retailed for a substantial $5 (about £85 in today's money) — half the average working man's weekly pay — yet sold by the millions.

The most difficult part of development was engineering the blades, as thin, cheap steel was difficult to work and sharpen. This accounts for the delay between the initial idea and the product's introduction.

Production began in 1903, when he sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. The following year, he sold 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades, thanks in part to Gillette's low prices, automated manufacturing techniques and good advertising. By 1908, the corporation had established manufacturing facilities in the United States, Canada, England, France and Germany. Razor sales reached 450,000 units and blade sales exceeded 70 million units in 1915. In 1918, when the U.S. entered World War I, the company provided all American soldiers with a field razor set, paid for by the government.

Gillette was also a Utopian Socialist. He published a book titled The Human Drift (1894), which advocated that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. A later book, World Corporation (1910), was a prospectus for a company set up to create this vision. He offered former US President Theodore Roosevelt the presidency of the company, with a fee of one million dollars. Roosevelt declined the offer.

Gillette died in Los Angeles, California at the age of 77, and was interred in the lower levels of the Begonia Corridor in the Great Mausoleum located at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. He was almost bankrupt at the time of his death, due both to his having spent large amounts of money on property, and to his having lost much of the value of his corporate shares as a result of the Great Depression.

Some peers in the marketing industry quote him as one of the innovators who revolutionized the Freebie marketing ideas. The Gillette Company continued to thrive and sell products under a variety of brand names including Gillette, Braun, Oral-B, and Duracell until 2005, when the company was sold to Procter & Gamble for $57 billion USD.

1836 - Three people were killed at Great Corby, near Carlisle in Cumbria, in the first fatal railway derailment.

1894 - Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist of Treasure Island, Kidnapped and Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, died, aged 45 on the island of Samoa.

1910 – Modern neon lighting is first demonstrated by Georges Claude at the Paris Motor Show.

1917 – After nearly 20 years of planning and construction, including two collapses causing 89 deaths, the Quebec Bridge opens to traffic.

1926 - In an episode as puzzling and intriguing as any in her many novels, Agatha Christie disappeared from her Surrey home and was discovered on the 14th December staying under an assumed name at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate. She said she had no recollection of how she came to be in Yorkshire.

1961 - At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Henri Matisse's painting "Le Bateau," which had been hung upside-down for 46 days, was righted.

1976 – An assassination attempt is made on Bob Marley. He is shot twice, but plays a concert two days later.

1977 - Wings started a nine week run at No.1 with Mull of Kintyre. It was the first single to sell over 2 million in the UK.

1984 – Bhopal Disaster: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.

1988 - Health minister Edwina Currie provoked outrage by saying that most of Britain's egg production was infected with the salmonella bacteria.

1999 – NASA loses radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere.

2005 – XCOR Aerospace makes first manned rocket aircraft delivery of US Mail in Mojave, California.

1154 - The only Englishman to become a pope, Nicholas Breakspear, became Adrian IV.

1586 - Queen Elizabeth I conferred the death sentence on Mary Queen of Scots after discovering a plot to assassinate her and bring about a Roman Catholic uprising.

1745 – Charles Edward Stewart's army reaches Derby, its furthest point during the second Jacobite Rising.

1798 - British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger announced the introduction of Income Tax to help finance the war against France.

1872 - U.S. brigantine Mary Celeste was found adrift and deserted with its cargo intact, in the Atlantic Ocean between the Azores and Portugal.

1948 - George Orwell completed the final draft of the book Nineteen Eighty Four which was published on 8th June 1949.

1954 – The first Burger King is opened in Miami, Florida, United States

1961 - Birth control pills became available on the NHS.

1980 – English rock group Led Zeppelin officially disbands, following the death of drummer John Bonham on September 25th.

1996 - Mars Pathfinder lifted off from Cape Canaveral and embarked on a successful 310 million-mile trip to explore the Red Planet's surface.

2006 – An adult giant squid is caught on video for the first time by Tsunemi Kubodera near the Ogasawara Islands, 1,000 km (620 mi) south of Tokyo.

(04-12-2011 14:25 )skully Wrote: [ -> ]2006 – An adult giant squid is caught on video for the first time by Tsunemi Kubodera near the Ogasawara Islands, 1,000 km (620 mi) south of Tokyo.

Thankfully, they live 3,000ft down in the ocean, as they grow to 45ft in length and you wouldn't want to come across one when paddling in the sea!

771 – Charlemagne becomes the sole King of the Franks after the death of his brother Carloman.

1496 – King Manuel I of Portugal issues a decree of expulsion of "heretics" from the country.

1766 - James Christie, the founder of the famous auctioneers, held his first sale in London. Christie's main London salesroom is on King Street in St. James's, where it has been based since 1823.

1848 – California Gold Rush: In a message before the U.S. Congress, US President James K. Polk confirms that large amounts of gold had been discovered in California.

1933 - German physicist Albert Einstein was granted a visa, making it possible for him to travel to the United States.

1933 – Prohibition in the United States ends: Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to enact the amendment (this overturned the 18th Amendment which had made the manufacture, sale, or transportation of alcohol illegal in the United States).

1945 – Flight 19 is lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

1952 - The Great Smog. A cold fog descended on London, combining with air pollution and killed at least 12,000 in the weeks and months that followed.

1958 - The Queen dialled Edinburgh and spoke to the Lord Provost from Bristol, to inaugurate the first direct dialled trunk call, known as STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialling)

1958 - Prime Minister Harold Macmillan opened the Preston bypass in Lancashire. It was the first stretch of motorway in Britain and is now part of the M6 and M55 motorways.

2005 - The Civil Partnership Act came into effect in the United Kingdom. It gave same-sex couples rights and responsibilities identical to civil marriage. In addition a formal process for dissolving partnerships was put in place, akin to divorce.

1421 - Henry VI, youngest King of England to accede the throne was born.

1768 - The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica was published.

1774 - Austria became the first nation to introduce a state education system.

1877 – Thomas Edison, using his new phonograph, makes one of the earliest recordings of a human voice, reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb".

1884 - Army engineers completed construction of the Washington Monument, placing the 3300-pound marble capstone atop it.

1897 - The world's first fleet of motorised taxi cabs started operating in London.

1917 – In Canada, a munitions explosion kills more than 1,900 people and destroys part of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

1921 - Irish independence was granted for the 26 southern states that became known as the Irish Free State. Six counties which formed Ulster (Northern Ireland) remained as part of the UK.

1957 – Project Vanguard: A launchpad explosion of Vanguard TV3 thwarts the first United States attempt to launch a satellite into Earth orbit.

1983 - Surgeons successfully completed the first heart and lung transplant operation to be performed in Britain. Swedish journalist, Lars Ljungberg underwent the transplant, receiving the organs of a woman from the south of England who had died the previous day.

1994 - The Queen gave the go ahead for oil drilling to take place in the grounds of Windsor Castle. The move came after studies showed there could be up to £1bn of oil lying beneath the castle.

1998 - Endeavour's astronauts connected the first two building blocks of the International Space Station in the shuttle cargo bay.

2006 – NASA reveals photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggesting the presence of liquid water on Mars.

1732 – The Royal Opera House opens at Covent Garden, London.

1817 - The death of William Bligh, rear-Admiral who was captain of the HMS Bounty at the time of the mutiny.

1869 – American outlaw Jesse James commits his first confirmed bank robbery in Gallatin, Missouri.

1941 – World War II: Attack on Pearl Harbor – The Imperial Japanese Navy attacks the United States Pacific Fleet and its defending Army Air Forces and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, causing a declaration of war upon Japan by the United States.

1972 - America's last manned moon mission to date was launched as Apollo 17 blasted off from Cape Canaveral.

1979 - Production of MG Midget sports cars came to an end. 73,899 of the last version were produced and the last 500 cars were painted black.

1988 - A 6.9 magnitude earthquake in the Soviet Union devastated northern Armenia; official estimates put the death toll at 25,000.

1993 - Protesters lost a 20 year fight to save a 250 year old chestnut tree in east London. Twenty protesters were arrested after they clashed with 200 police officers sent to ensure a court order to cut down the tree was enforced and that the planned motorway extension could go ahead.

1995 – The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.

2002 - Iraq handed over its arms declaration to the United Nations, denying it had weapons of mass destruction.

1980: John Lennon shot dead
Former Beatle John Lennon has been shot dead by an unknown gunman who opened fire outside the musician's New York apartment.
The 40-year-old was shot several times as he entered the Dakota, his luxury apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side, opposite Central Park, at 2300 local time.

He was rushed in a police car to St Luke's Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he died.

His wife, Yoko Ono, who is understood to have witnessed the attack, was with him.

Shots heard

A police spokesman said a suspect was in custody, but he had no other details of the shooting.

"This was no robbery," the spokesman said, adding that Mr Lennon was probably shot by a "deranged" person.

Witness reports say at least three shots were fired and others have claimed they heard six.

There are also reports Mr Lennon staggered up six steps into the vestibule after he was shot, before collapsing.

Jack Douglas, Lennon's producer, said he and the Lennons had been at a studio called the Record Plant in mid-town earlier in the evening and Lennon left at 2230.

Mr Lennon said he planned to have some dinner and then return home, Mr Douglas said.

Fans at scene

The Lennons are said to have left their limousine on the street and walked up the driveway when the gunman opened fire.

It is unclear whether the man had been lying in wait in the entrance to the building for Mr Lennon, or whether he came up behind him.

Witnesses describe the gunman as a "pudgy kind of man", 35 to 40 years old with brown hair.

Other former band members, Paul McCartney, guitarist George Harrison and drummer Ringo Starr are thought to have been informed of Lennon's murder.

Fans have already begun arriving at the scene, many still unaware Lennon has died.

Mr Lennon is survived by his wife, their son Sean, and his son from a previous marriage, Julian.


E-mail this story to a friend




Watch/Listen

Lennon had been at a mid-town studio earlier in the evening


BBC's Peter Hobday: "He died almost instantly" - broadcast 9.12.80




In Context
John Lennon was shot four times in the back by Mark Chapman who had asked the former Beatle for his autograph only hours before he laid in wait and killed him.
Chapman pleaded guilty to gunning down Mr Lennon and is currently serving life in Attica prison near New York. In October 2004 he failed for the third time to secure his release.

He said he had heard voices in his head telling him to kill the world-famous musician.

Twenty years after his death millions of fans paid tribute to Mr Lennon in his home town of Liverpool and in New York.

His widow launched a campaign against gun violence in the United States to mark the anniversary.


Stories From 8 Dec
1980: John Lennon shot dead
1965: New UK race law 'not tough enough
2003: Greek terrorists convicted
1995: Youth gang stabs head teacher to death
1983: Television cameras allowed into Lords



http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/artists/4d544...f471d385b9