On this day

1306 – In front of the high altar of Greyfriars Church in Dumfries, Robert the Bruce murders John Comyn, his leading political rival, sparking revolution in the Scottish Wars of Independence.

1763 - Following the Seven Years War, the Treaty of Paris was signed, with France ceding Canada to Britain.

1840 - Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, both aged 20, were married in St James' Palace, London.

1863 - The fire extinguisher was patented by Alanson Crane.

1906 - Britain's first modern & largest battleship, HMS Dreadnought, was launched.

1933 – The New York City-based Postal Telegraph Company introduces the first singing telegram.

1942 - The first gold record (sprayed with gold by the record company RCA Victor) was presented to Glenn Miller for Chattanooga Choo Choo.

1992 - Boxer Mike Tyson was convicted in Indianapolis of raping Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant.

1995 - The first Briton to walk in space was Cambridge educated Dr. Michael Foale.

1996 – The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov for the first time.

2005 – North Korea announces that it possesses nuclear weapons.

660 BC – Traditional date for the foundation of Japan by Emperor Jimmu.

55 – Tiberius Claudius Caesar Britannicus, heir to the Roman Emperorship, dies under mysterious circumstances in Rome. This clears the way for Nero to become Emperor.

1254 - The British Parliament first convened.

1531 – Henry VIII of England is recognized as supreme head of the Church of England.

1542 - Catherine Howard, the fifth queen consort of Henry VIII, was confined in the Tower of London and executed three days later.

1938 – BBC Television produces the world's first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Capek play R.U.R., which coined the term 'robot'.

1971 – Eighty-seven countries, including the US, UK, and USSR, sign the Seabed Treaty outlawing nuclear weapons in international waters.

1975 - Margaret Thatcher won the Conservative Party Leadership and became the first woman leader of a British political party.

1990 – Nelson Mandela, a political prisoner for 27 years, is released from Victor Verster Prison outside Cape Town, South Africa.

1997 – The Space Shuttle Discovery is launched on a mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope.

2006 - Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shoots a friend during a quail hunting trip on a southern Texas ranch...D'oh!

1554 - At the tender age of 16, Lady Jane Grey and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley were beheaded, he on Tower Hill, she on Tower Green, after being implicated in the Wyatt rebellion.

1793 - Congress passed the first fugitive slave law, requiring all states, including those that forbad slavery, to forcibly return slaves who had escaped from other states to their original owners.

1851 – Edward Hargraves announces that he has found gold in Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia, starting the Australian gold rush.

1947 – A meteor creates an impact crater in Sikhote-Alin, in the Soviet Union.

1954 - The British Standing Advisory Committee on cancer claimed that the illness had a definite link with cigarette smoking.

1994 - One hundred people made history by walking from France to England for the first time in millions of years. Each represented charities and voluntary organisations and walked the 31 mile Channel Tunnel which took, on average, 13 hours to complete.

1994 – Four men break into the National Gallery of Norway and steal Edward Munch's iconic painting The Scream.

2004 - Mattel announced the split of Barbie and Ken.

2004 – The city of San Francisco, California begins issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in response to a directive from Mayor Gavin Newsom.

1542 - Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII of England, was executed for adultery.

1633 - Galileo was detained by the Italian Inquisition in Rome.

1692 – Massacre of Glencoe: About 78 MacDonalds at Glen Coe, Scotland, are killed early in the morning for not promptly pledging allegiance to the new king, William of Orange.

1935 - Bruno Richard Hauptmann was found guilty of first degree murder in the kidnap-death of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Hauptmann was later executed.

1945 - 1400 RAF and 450 US Airforce planes bombed Dresden in three waves over a 14-hour period, devastating one of the world's most beautiful cities. Over a three-day period, 3,900 tons of explosives and incendiaries reduced much of the city to smouldering rubble and killed between 35,000 and 135,000 civilians.

1960 – With the success of a nuclear test codenamed Gerboise Bleue, France becomes the fourth country to possess nuclear weapons.

1961 – A 500,000-year-old rock is discovered near Olancha, California, US, that appears to anachronistically encase a spark plug - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coso_artifact

1991 – Gulf War: Two laser-guided smart bombs destroy the Amiriyah shelter in Baghdad. Allied forces said the bunker was being used as a military communications outpost, but over 400 Iraqi civilians inside were killed.

2004 – The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe's largest known diamond, the white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star Lucy after The Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

2008 – Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd makes a historic apology to the Indigenous Australians and the Stolen Generations.

(10-02-2011 12:48 )skully Wrote:  1942 - The first gold record (sprayed with gold by the record company RCA Victor) was presented to Glenn Miller for Chattanooga Choo Choo.

The first use of the term "Choo Choo" to describe a steam train is generally credited to the editor of the local newspaper in Chattanooga when reporting the arrival of the railway in 1880. The song lyrics contain considerable artistic license and lack of geographical knowledge, as "ham and eggs in the diner as you roll through Carolina" would be difficult on a Cincinnatti to Atlanta service that went nowhere near the Carolinas!

Despite being a city of approx 170,000 people Chattanooga hasn't had a passenger train since 1979 when all passenger services in Eastern Tennessee were withdrawn. The site of the former station is now a hotel which houses a railway exhibition and the biggest model railway in the world, and there is a steam railway which chugs for a mile or two for tourists.

Anybody in Chattannoga wanting to catch a passenger train now has to travel almost 120 miles south-east to Atlanta, 280 miles north to Indianapolis or 330 miles west to Memphis! However, the track to Atlanta is all still in place and used for freight and there were plans to look into reintroducing the service but with the cutbacks that is now on hold.

1492 – The fall of the Islamic Kingdom in Spain. The head churchman Pedro St. Valentino said this day would be known as the day of love and they called it Valentine's Day.

1779 – James Cook is killed by Native Hawaiians near Kealakekua on the Island of Hawaii.

1797 - The Spanish fleet was defeated off Cape St. Vincent by Admiral John Jervis and Captain Horatio Nelson.

1852 - London's famous children's hospital in Great Ormond Street accepted its first patient, three year-old Eliza Armstrong.

1876 – Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone, as does Elisha Gray.

1924 – The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is founded.

1929 - The St. Valentine's Day Massacre took place in a Chicago garage when Al Capone's employees gunned down seven members of the George "Bugs" Moran North Siders gang.

1946 - The world's first all electronic computer was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania - ENIAC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

1989 – Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini issues a fatwa encouraging Muslims to kill the author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie.

1989 – The first of 24 satellites of the Global Positioning System are placed into orbit.

2000 – The spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker enters orbit around asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid.

2003 - Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, was euthanized by veterinarians after being found to be suffering from progressive lung disease.

(14-02-2011 11:31 )skully Wrote:  1876 – Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone, as does Elisha Gray.

Gray should have gone down in history as the inventor of the telephone, but unfortunately when he rang the Patents Office he selected Option 3 instead of Option 2 and by the time they arranged a callback Bell had beaten him to it!

(12-02-2011 12:05 )skully Wrote:  2004 – The city of San Francisco, California begins issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples in response to a directive from Mayor Gavin Newsom.

18,000 couples took advantage of this ruling before the anti-gay lobby managed to bring a referendum in 2008 to let the voters of California decide the matter for themselves. "Proposition 8", as it became known, was carried by 52% to 48% and so once more banned gay marriages, but leaving the 18,000 couples in a legal limbo as to whether those who had beaten the ban were legal and/or recognised.

As you would expect in America, the lawyers weren't prepared to let it lie. In August 2010 the California Superior Court reversed the decision again, making gay marriage legal once more, but to prevent any more potential further problems, issues and heartache they also ruled that no more gay marriages could take place until the legal position was finalised.

In January 2011 the anti-gay movement petitioned the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal to reverse the decision back the other way but the Court ruled that they had no jurisdiction (they are a Federal Court and said they had no jurisdiction over a State decision). However, recognising that this issue would not go away and would probably go all the way to the US Supreme Court they referred the matter back to the Superior Court with an instruction that if the State Court thought it proper, they would indeed assume jurisdiction and rule on the matter, allowing it to go all the way to Washington.

The matter will not be finally decided for at least another 18 months....

1842 - In New York City, adhesive postage stamps were used for the first time.

1928 - After some 70 years' work, the 1st Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was completed.

1952 – King George VI is buried in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.

1965 - The new Canadian Maple Leaf national flag was raised above Parliament Hill in Ottawa.

1969 - R. G. Edwards of the Cambridge Physiological Laboratory, Cambridge, England, made the first in vitro fertilization of human egg cells.

1971 - The British Government launched a new decimal currency across the country. The familiar pound (£), shilling (s) and pence (d) coins that had been in existence for more than 1000 years were to be phased out in the space of 18 months in favour of a system with 100 pennies to the pound rather than 240.

2003 - Protests against the Iraq war occurred in over 600 cities worldwide. Estimates from 8,000,000 - 30,000,000 people took part, making this the largest peace demonstration ever.

2005 – YouTube, the Internet site on which videos may be shared and viewed by others, is launched in the United States.

1659 - The first British cheque (for £10) was written by Nicholas Vanacker and is now in the archives of the National Westminster Bank.

1923 - Howard Carter, having discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun 12 months previously, lifted the lid off the sarcophagus to reveal a golden effigy of the young king.

1932 - The first fruit tree patent was issued to James E. Markham, for a peach tree.

1937 – Wallace H. Carothers receives a United States patent for nylon.

1972 - Many homes and businesses were without electricity for up to nine hours a day from this day. Miners, into the sixth week of their strike over pay, picketed power stations and all other sources of fuel supply in an attempt to step up pressure on the Government.

1990 - Wives of Royal Navy seamen protested over a decision to allow WRENs (women sailors) to go to sea.

2005 - The Kyoto Protocol that aimed to slow down global warming took effect, but the US and Australia refused to support it.

2006 – The last Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) is decommissioned by the United States Army.