The UK Babe Channels Forum

1272 – While travelling during the Ninth Crusade, Prince Edward becomes King of England upon Henry III of England's death, but he will not return to England for nearly two years to assume the throne.

1532 – Francisco Pizarro and his men capture Inca Emperor Atahualpa.

1793 – French Revolution: Ninety anti-republican Catholic priests are executed by drowning at Nantes.

1849 – A Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence is later commuted to hard labor.

1904 – English engineer John Ambrose Fleming receives a patent for the thermionic valve (vacuum tube).

1907 – Cunard Line's RMS Mauretania, sister ship of RMS Lusitania, sets sail on her maiden voyage from Liverpool, England to New York City.

1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens.

1920 – Qantas, Australia's national airline, is founded as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Limited.

1938 – LSD is first synthesized by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.

1943 – World War II: American bombers strike a hydro-electric power facility and heavy water factory in German-controlled Vemork, Norway.

1944 – Dueren, Germany is destroyed by Allied bombers.

1945 – Cold War: Operation Paperclip – the United States Army secretly admits 88 German scientists and engineers to help in the development of rocket technology.

1945 – UNESCO is founded.

1965 – Venera program: the Soviet Union launches the Venera 3 space probe toward Venus, that will be the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet.

1973 – Skylab program: NASA launches Skylab 4 with a crew of three astronauts from Cape Canaveral, Florida for an 84-day mission.

1992 – The Hoxne Hoard is discovered by metal detectorist Eric Lawes in Hoxne, Suffolk.

1810 – Sweden declares war on its ally the United Kingdom to begin the Anglo-Swedish War, although no fighting ever takes place.

1820 – Captain Nathaniel Palmer becomes the first American to see Antarctica.

1903 – The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party splits into two groups; the Bolsheviks (Russian for "majority") and Mensheviks (Russian for "minority").

1939 – Nine Czech students are executed as a response to anti-Nazi demonstrations prompted by the death of Jan Opletal. In addition, all Czech universities are shut down and over 1200 Czech students sent to concentration camps. Since this event, International Students' Day is celebrated in many countries, especially in the Czech Republic.

1947 – American scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain observe the basic principles of the transistor, a key element for the electronics revolution of the 20th Century.

1970 – Vietnam War: Lieutenant William Calley goes on trial for the My Lai Massacre.

1970 – Luna program: The Soviet Union lands Lunokhod 1 on Mare Imbrium (Sea of Rains) on the Moon. This is the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world and is released by the orbiting Luna 17 spacecraft.

1982 – Duk Koo Kim dies unexpectedly from injuries sustained during a 14-round match against Ray Mancini in Las Vegas, Nevada, prompting reforms in the sport of boxing.

1989 – The Velvet Revolution begins: In Czechoslovakia, a student demonstration in Prague is quelled by riot police. This sparks an uprising aimed at overthrowing the communist government (it succeeds on December 29).

1997 – In Luxor, Egypt, 62 people are killed by 6 Islamic militants outside the Temple of Hatshepsut, known as Luxor massacre (The police then kill the assailants).

1307 – William Tell shoots an apple off his son's head.

1421 – A seawall at the Zuiderzee dike in the Netherlands breaks, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people. This event will be known as Sint-Elisabethsvloed.

1626 – St. Peter's Basilica is consecrated.

1803 – The Battle of Vertières, the last major battle of the Haitian Revolution, is fought, leading to the establishment of the Republic of Haiti, the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere.

1905 – Prince Carl of Denmark becomes King Haakon VII of Norway.

1926 – George Bernard Shaw refuses to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize".

1940 – New York City's "Mad Bomber" George Metesky places his first bomb at a Manhattan office building used by Consolidated Edison.

1947 – The Ballantyne's Department Store fire in Christchurch, New Zealand, kills 41; it is the worst fire disaster in the history of New Zealand.

1963 – The first electronic push-button telephone system, with Touch-Tone dialing, goes into service.

1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple cult to a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children.

1987 – King's Cross fire: in London, 31 people die in a fire at the city's busiest underground station, King's Cross St Pancras.

1988 – War on Drugs: U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill into law allowing the death penalty for drug traffickers.

1999 – In College Station, Texas, 12 are killed and 27 injured at Texas A&M University when the 59-foot-tall (18 m) Aggie Bonfire, under construction for the annual football game against the University of Texas, collapses at 2:42am.

2002 – Iraq disarmament crisis: United Nations weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix arrive in Iraq.

2003 – In the United Kingdom, the Local Government Act 2003, repealing controversial anti-gay amendment Section 28, becomes effective.

19th November 1994 - First Ever National Lottery Draw

It was on this day in 1994 that a now iconic piece of UK television first took flight. The National Lottery held it's first live draw in an hour long opener, presented by the BBC.

History

A statute in English law, made in 1698, prohibited the use of lotteries and required changes in law for live gambling to be legalised. A 1934 act legalised small lotteries and this was updated by further acts in 1956 and 1976. However, the law still required that the government must authorise the production of any desired national lotteries. The UK set up a state-franchised lottery, the National Lottery Commission, authorised by Prime Minister John Major's government in 1993. Camelot Group were the elected operator of the franchise, first awarded the licence on 25th May 1994, then again in 2001 and 2007. The Isle of Man later joined the party, gaining access to the National Lottery on 2nd December 1999 at the request of Tynwald, the legislature of the island.

First Show

The first live broadcast was on 19th November 1994. In a special one hour long show hosted by Noel Edmonds, himself already a favourite of the British people thanks to the successes of Noel's Saturday Night Roadshow, Noel's House Party and Telly Addicts, BBC One milked all the entertainment they could from this historical piece of television. An opening jackpot of £5,874,778 was eventually shared between seven winners. I've dug out this video from YouTube that shows the introduction to the programme, the decision of which set of balls to use and the first ever draw itself:-



Rules, structure and variations

Players must be 16 or over and each set of number lines costs £1. Syndicates, namely the appointed manager of the syndicate, must follow the same rules of eligibility as the non-syndicate players. Online sales from the official website are restricted to holders of UK and IOM bank accounts, the player must have a UK or IOM residential address and must be physically present within the UK or IOM when making the transaction.

The National Lottery follows a structure which allocates finances accordingly. All prizes are tax free and of each pound spent, 50p is donated to the overall prize fund. Then 28p to 'good causes' as set out by Parliament, 12p to the UK Government as duty and 5p to retailers as commission, while Camelot receives 4.5p to cover operating costs and 0.5p profit.

The main game was rebranded as simply 'Lotto' in 2002 in an effort to combat falling sales, although the franchise as a collective still retains the National Lottery identity. Aswell as the main game, various other games have been introduced over the years as the franchise established itself as one of the most popular forms of gambling in the UK. Thunderball, Dream Number, Daily Play, Hot Picks, the EuroMillions and countless scratchcard games are all examples of the growing National Lottery empire. Another change over the years has been the introduction of other days of the week on which to have a flutter - the Lotto now operates on Saturdays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

There are now 14 different machines available for use, namely Arthur, Amethyst, Galahad, Garnet, Guinevere, Lancelot, Magnum, Merlin, Moonstone, Opal, Pearl, Sapphire, Topaz and Vyvyan. In the early years Gordon Kennedy, Carol Smillie, Bob Monkhouse and Anthea Turner became regular presenters. Since then the BBC have developed several different forms of entertainment programming to incorporate the Lotto draws. These consist of many different quiz show formats, each with its own theme and presenter, with some of the most notable including:

1 vs 100 (Dermot O' Leary / Ben Shephard)
Winning Lines (Philip Schofield / Simon Mayo);
Jet Set (Eamonn Holmes);
Wright Around The World (Ian Wright);
In It To Win It (Dale Winton);
and the current incarnation - Who Dares Wins (Nick Knowles).

To date, the National Lottery has created 2,900 millionaires. Unfortunately, I've not yet been one of them, although I have won £81 once by getting 4 numbers.

Further links below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Lo...d_Kingdom)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates...702998.stm

1916 – Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn Pictures.

1941 – World War II: Battle between HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran. The two ships sink each other off the coast of Western Australia, with the loss of 645 Australians and about 77 German seamen.

1942 – World War II: Battle of Stalingrad – Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR's favor.

1946 – Afghanistan, Iceland and Sweden join the United Nations.

1947 – George VI of the United Kingdom creates Philip Mountbatten the Duke of Edinburgh in preparation for his wedding to George's elder daughter, Princess Elizabeth, the next day.

1954 – Télé Monte Carlo, Europe's oldest private television channel, is launched by Prince Rainier III.

1967 – The establishment of TVB, the first wireless commercial television station in Hong Kong.

1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (the "Ocean of Storms") and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.

1998 – Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of the Artist Without Beard sells at auction for US$71.5 million.

1999 – Shenzhou 1: The People's Republic of China launches its first Shenzhou spacecraft.

2002 – The Greek oil tanker Prestige splits in half and sinks off the coast of Galicia, releasing over 20 million US gallons (76,000 m³) of oil in the largest environmental disaster in Spanish and Portuguese history.

1820 – An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America (Herman elton's 1851 novel Moby-Dick is in part inspired by this story).

1945 – Nuremberg Trials: Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.

1947 – Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London.

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.

1979 – Grand Mosque Seizure: About 200 Sunni Muslims revolt in Saudi Arabia at the site of the Kaaba in Mecca during the pilgrimage and take about 6000 hostages. The Saudi government receives help from French special forces to put down the uprising.

1980 – Lake Peigneur drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. The resulting whirlpool sucked the drilling platform, several barges, houses and trees thousands of feet down to the bottom of the dissolving salt deposit.

1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.

1989 – Velvet Revolution: The number of protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million.

1992 – In England, a fire breaks out in Windsor Castle, badly damaging the castle and causing over £50 million worth of damage.

1994 – The Angolan government and UNITA rebels sign the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia, ending 19 years of civil war (localized fighting resumes the next year).

1998 – The first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched.

164 BC – Judas Maccabaeus, son of Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, restores the Temple in Jerusalem. This event is commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah.

1783 – In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d'Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight.

1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

1905 – Albert Einstein's paper, Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, is published in the journal "Annalen der Physik". This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass. This leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc².

1920 – Irish War of Independence: In Dublin, 31 people are killed in what became known as "Bloody Sunday". This included fourteen British informants, fourteen Irish civilians and three Irish Republican Army prisoners.

1953 – The British Natural History Museum announces that the "Piltdown Man" skull, initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found, is a hoax.

1964 – The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opens to traffic (at the time it is the world's longest suspension bridge).

1974 – The Birmingham Pub Bombings kill 21 people. The Birmingham Six are sentenced to life in prison for the crime but subsequently acquitted.

1980 – A deadly fire breaks out at the MGM Grand Hotel in Paradise, Nevada (now Bally's Las Vegas). 87 people are killed and more than 650 are injured in the worst disaster in Nevada history.

1990 – The Charter of Paris for a New Europe refocuses the efforts of the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe on post-Cold War issues.

1995 – The Dayton Peace Agreement is initialed at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, ending three and a half years of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The agreement is formally ratified in Paris, on December 14 that same year.

2002 – NATO invites Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia to become members.

2004 – The second round of the Ukrainian presidential election is held, giving rise to massive protests and controversy over the election's integrity.

2004 – The Paris Club agrees to write off 80% (up to $100 billion) of Iraq's external debt.

1718 – Off the coast of North Carolina, British pirate Edward Teach (best known as Blackbeard) is killed in battle with a boarding party led by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard.

1869 – In Dumbarton, Scotland, the clipper ship Cutty Sark is launched – one of the last clippers ever built, and the only one still surviving today.

1928 – The premier performance of Ravel's Boléro takes place in Paris.

1935 – The China Clipper, the first transpacific mail and passenger service, takes off from Alameda, California for its first commercial flight. It reaches its destination, Manila, a week later.

1943 – World War II: War in the Pacific – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek meet in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss ways to defeat Japan (see Cairo Conference).

1954 – The Humane Society of the United States is founded.

1963 – In Dallas, Texas, US President John F. Kennedy is assassinated and Texas Governor John B. Connally is seriously wounded. Suspect Lee Harvey Oswald is later captured and charged with the murder of both the President and police officer J. D. Tippit. Oswald is shot two days later by Jack Ruby while in police custody.

1974 – The United Nations General Assembly grants the Palestine Liberation Organization observer status.

1977 – British Airways inaugurates a regular London to New York City supersonic Concorde service.

1986 – Mike Tyson defeats Trevor Berbick to become youngest Heavyweight champion in boxing history.

1988 – In Palmdale, California, the first prototype B-2 Spirit stealth bomber is revealed.

1995 – Toy Story is released as the first feature-length film created completely using computer-generated imagery.

1997 – In Nigeria, more than 100 people are killed at an attack aimed at the contestants of the Miss World contest.

2003 – Baghdad DHL attempted shootdown incident, shortly after takeoff the left wing is hit by a surface-to-air missile and is forced to land.

2004 – The Orange Revolution begins in Ukraine, resulting from the presidential elections.

2005 – Angela Merkel becomes the first female Chancellor of Germany.

534 BC – Thespis of Icaria becomes the first recorded actor to portray a character onstage.

1499 – Pretender to the throne Perkin Warbeck is hanged for reportedly attempting to escape from the Tower of London. He had invaded England in 1497, claiming to be the lost son of King Edward IV of England.

1867 – The Manchester Martyrs are hanged in Manchester, England for killing a police officer while freeing two Irish nationalists from custody.

1890 – King William III of the Netherlands dies without a male heir and a special law is passed to allow his daughter Princess Wilhelmina to become his heir.

1910 – Johan Alfred Ander becomes the last person to be executed in Sweden.

1940 – World War II: Romania becomes a signatory of the Tripartite Pact, officially joining the Axis Powers.

1955 – The Cocos Islands are transferred from the control of the United Kingdom to Australia.

1963 – The BBC broadcasts the first ever episode of Doctor Who (starring William Hartnell) which is the world's longest running science fiction drama.

1972 – The Soviet Union makes its final attempt at successfully launching N-1 Rocket.

1976 – Apneist - Jacques Mayol is the first man to reach a depth of 100 m undersea without breathing equipment.

1992 – The first Smartphone IBM Simon was introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

2001 – The Convention on Cybercrime is signed in Budapest, Hungary.

2004 – The Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi, the largest religious building in Georgia, is consecrated.

2007 – MS Explorer, a cruise liner carrying 154 people, sinks in the Antarctic Ocean south of Argentina after hitting an iceberg near the South Shetland Islands. There are no fatalities.

2010 – The Bombardment of Yeonpyeong occurs on Yeonpyeong Island, South Korea. The North Korean artillery attack kills 2 civilians and 2 South Korean marines.

1248 – In the middle of the night a mass on the north side of Mont Granier suddenly collapsed, in one of the largest historical rockslope failures known in Europe.

1429 – Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieges La Charité.

1542 – The Battle of Solway Moss: The English army defeats the Scots.

1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, the anniversary of which is sometimes called "Evolution Day"

1932 – In Washington, D.C., the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (better known as the FBI Crime Lab) officially opens.

1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald is murdered by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. The shooting happens to be broadcast live on television.

1969 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 command module splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to the Moon.

1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (AKA D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.

1972 - One of only eight 1933 pennies minted was auctioned at Sotherbys for £7,000.

1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed "Lucy" (after The Beatles song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"), in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.

1991 - Freddie Mercury, English rock singer, died at the age of 45, just one day after he publicly announced that he was HIV positive.

1993 - The last 14 bottles of Scotch whisky salvaged from the SS Politician, wrecked in 1941 and the inspiration of the book and film, Whisky Galore, were sold at auction for £11,462.