1667 – The blind and impoverished John Milton sells the copyright of
Paradise Lost for £10.
1773 - The British Parliament passed the Tea Act, a bill designed to save the East India Company and grant it a monopoly on the American tea trade.
1828 - The opening of the London Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park, London.
1840 – Foundation stone for new
Palace of Westminster, London, is laid by wife of Sir Charles Barry.
1939 - Conscription for men aged 20 - 21 was announced in Britain.
1961 – Sierra Leone is granted its independence from the United Kingdom, with Milton Margai as the first Prime Minister.
1968 - The Abortion Act legalised abortion in Britain when pregnancy could endanger the physical or mental health of a woman or child.
1981 –
Xerox PARC introduces the computer mouse.
1992 – Betty Boothroyd becomes the first woman to be elected Speaker of the British House of Commons in its 700-year history.
2005 – The superjumbo jet aircraft
Airbus A380 makes its first flight from Toulouse, France.
2006 – Construction begins on the
Freedom Tower for the new World Trade Center in New York City.
(27-04-2012 14:37 )skully Wrote: [ -> ]1667 – The blind and impoverished John Milton sells the copyright of Paradise Lost for £10.
The obvious question is "how much would this be worth in today's money"? The idea that inflation is a modern phenomena is largely, but not completely, right. We've always had it in one form or another and there have always been unexpected crises putting pressure on the economy. In the medieval period a shortage of grain at harvest would lead to rising food prices and upset the balance leading to political problems, unrest and starvation, but in earlier times there were long periods of price stability until the next war came along which in turn pushed up prices in the short term.
It is also difficult to gauge as whilst compiling official national government statistics started with the Domesday Book it is only in the last 150 years or so that the infrastructure, technology and communications have existed to put together really accurate figures.
This, combined with the effect of compound interest over a period of 345 years, makes getting an accurate figure well nigh impossible. Let's just assume for the moment that annual inflation was constant over the entire period. the effect on £10 would be as follows:
1% pa - £309
2% pa - £9,200
3% pa - £268,400
We know that average UK inflation in the period 1900 - 2011 was 4.2% pa and if this was replicated throughout the period that would give a figure of over £14,000,000 which is clearly ridiculous. So what
is an accurate figure? If we surmise:
1% inflation during the relatively stable 18th century
2% inflation during the 19th century which saw the Napoleonic Wars and the rapid growth of industrialisation
4.2% inflation from 1900 (the point from which official accurate figures exist)
that would give a result of about £26,000.
A number of Universities have done historical research into people's wages and based on an earnings (as opposed to a retail prices) index, a wage of £10 in 1667 comes out at around £17,000 today (in the 1600s a Carpenter earned about £5 a year).
Therefore, it is probably not unreasonable to estimate that Milton's £10 was worth something in the low £20,000s in today's money. Not a pittance but certainly not a fortune, especially when you consider that he lived for a further seven years, dying in 1674 at the age of 65.
1770 - English navigator Captain James Cook and his crew, including the botanist Joseph Banks, landed in Australia, at Stingray Bay, which was later named Botany Bay.
1789 - The crew of the Bounty, led by Fletcher Christian, mutinied against the harsh life at sea under Captain Bligh. They were on the return journey from Tahiti where they had spent six months gathering breadfruit trees. Bligh and 17/18 others were cast adrift in a small boat without a chart. While the mutineers eventually colonized Pitcairn Island, Bligh managed to sail the small craft 3,618 miles to Timor, near Java, arriving there on 14th June.
1932 – A vaccine for
yellow fever is announced for use on humans.
1945 – Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by a firing squad consisting of members of the Italian resistance movement.
1947 - Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl and five others set out in a balsa wood craft known as
Kon Tiki to prove that Peruvian Indians could have settled in Polynesia.
1969 – Charles de Gaulle resigns as President of France.
1986 – The United States Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise becomes the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to transit the Suez Canal, navigating from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea to relieve the USS Coral Sea.
1996 – In Tasmania, Australia, Martin Bryant goes on a shooting spree, killing 35 people and seriously injuring 21 more.
2001 – Millionaire Dennis Tito becomes the world's first space tourist.
1429 - Joan of Arc arrived at the besieged city of Orleans to eventually lead her French forces to victory (on May 6th) over the English.
1587 – Francis Drake leads a raid in the Bay of Cádiz, sinking at least 23 ships of the Spanish fleet.
1913 - Swedish-born U.S. inventor Gideon Sundback patented the zipper.
1935 - Just one year after their invention by Percy Shaw of Yorkshire, 'cats' eyes' were being inserted into British roads.
1945 – World War II – Fuehrerbunker: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker and designates Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor. Both Hitler and Braun will commit suicide the next day.
1967 – After refusing induction into the United States Army the day before (citing religious reasons), Muhammad Ali is stripped of his boxing title.
1986 - The Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, was laid to rest alongside her husband, the abdicated King Edward VIII, at Frogmore in Windsor.
1992 – Los Angeles riots: Riots in Los Angeles, California, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 53 people are killed and hundreds of buildings are destroyed.
2005 – Syria completes withdrawal from Lebanon, ending 29 years of occupation.
1492 – Spain gives Christopher Columbus his commission of exploration.
1789 – On the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City, George Washington takes the oath of office to become the first elected President of the United States.
1803 – Louisiana Purchase: The United States purchases the Louisiana Territory from France for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the young nation.
1900 – Hawaii becomes a territory of the United States, with Sanford B. Dole as governor.
1943 - The body of a mystery man (planted with false invasion plans) was used by Britain to fool Nazi Germany into defending the 'wrong' regions of the Mediterranean, aiding a successful invasion of Sicily.
1945 - Nazi leader Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Before beginning his assault on Europe, Hitler had assured his followers that the Third Reich would last for 1,000 years. His mistress, Eva Braun, whom he'd married the day before, died alongside him after taking a cyanide pill.
1948 - The Land Rover was introduced at the Amsterdam Motor Show.
1952 - The British public got the chance to read 'The Diary of a Young Girl', written by Anne Frank who hid from the Nazis in Holland during the war.
1975 – Fall of Saigon (or Liberation of Saigon from the Communist perspective): Communist forces gain control of Saigon. The Vietnam War formally ends with the unconditional surrender of South Vietnamese president Duong Van Minh.
1993 - Professional tennis player Monica Seles was stabbed while resting courtside during a match at Hamburg, Germany. She suffered a puncture wound and was released from the hospital a few days later.
2004 – U.S. media release graphic photos of American soldiers abusing and sexually humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.
2009 – Chrysler automobile company files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
1971 - The National Railroad Passenger Corporation came into being. Better known as “Amtrak”, it is responsible for the provision of long-distance passenger trains in the United States.
It is surprising that in the land of free enterprise, Amtrak is a nationalised business, owned entirely by the Federal Government, although it receives some funding from States towards the cost of local trains.
The films of the immediate post-war period show American trains as elegant Streamliners with crisp linen in the restaurant cars, but rail travel was already in serious decline by this time. Although more people were getting cars, which affected local trains and suburban services, the main damage to long distance trains was caused by the expansion of air travel. By UK standards, the distances between US cities are huge. New York to Chicago is 17 hours by train but only just over two and a half by air; to fly from Miami to Los Angeles is five and half hours but by train it takes nearly five DAYS.
By the 1960s local passenger services with being withdrawn in their hundreds but the problem some of the historic major companies had was that their original 19th century licences had been granted on the basis that they were obliged to run passenger trains and this was still legally binding. Freight remained extremely profitable but passenger trains were costing them an arm and a leg so the government were lobbied to find some way out. The solution was Amtrak and it was expected to be temporary. The then US President Richard Nixon was persuaded that it would need funding for no more than three years, after which time the passenger trains would quietly fade away.
But try as they might the trains just wouldn't go away, aided by a vociferous pro-rail lobby and politicians from rural states whose constituents would be otherwise isolated. Now, more than 40 years later, Amtrak limps from one financial crisis to another with insufficient funding and dated rolling stock but still maintains a skeletal service in 46 states. Although the general political divide is that Republicans don't like Amtrak but the Democrats do (Bush II was particularly anti-rail and tried to veto all funding on more than one occasion), there are exceptions on both sides, and the biggest cuts to services came under Democratic Presidents in 1979 and 1997.
As it is the areas around New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, southern California and Silicon Valley get frequent, fast, modern train services as we would recognise them, but many large cities have no passenger trains at all, including some of over 1 million inhabitants such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, Nashville, Louisville and Columbus. Nor do another 16 cities with a population of 500,000 to 1 million, such as Tulsa, Baton Rouge and Chattanooga, which hasn't seen a choo-choo since 1979 and is now more than 100 miles from the nearest train service.
Denver, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Minneapolis are among many cities that get just two trains a day. Houston, with a population of over 2.2 million, gets just six trains a week!
But despite this, there are still daily trains linking Chicago with LA, San Francisco, Dallas and Seattle to the west and New York, Washington and Boston to the east. For many small rural towns, especially in states like Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas the one daily train each way is the only public transport for hundreds of miles.
In recent years the effect of congestion and the soaring price of oil has seen the situation stabilise and there's been something of a mini rail revival with some states taking up the offer of matching federal funding to develop local services, and even plans for high-speed corridors in the mid-west and California, but there is no sign of a major boost to services any time soon.
1494 - Christopher Columbus sighted the island of Jamaica.
1802 – Washington, D.C. is incorporated as a city.
1841 - New Zealand was declared a British colony.
1934 - Science fiction writer H.G.Wells predicted there would be a world war before 1940.
1937 – Gone with the Wind, a novel by Margaret Mitchell, wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
1951 – London's Royal Festival Hall opens with the
Festival of Britain.
1960 – The
Anne Frank House opens in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
1978 – The first unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail (which would later become known as "spam") is sent by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative to every
ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.
2001 – The United States loses its seat on the U.N. Human Rights Commission for the first time since the commission was formed in 1947.
2003 – New Hampshire's famous
Old Man of the Mountain collapses.