Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.
1714 Georg Ludwig of Hanover arrives in England to sit on the English throne as King George I.
1793 The cornerstone of the US Capitol is laid by George Washington.
1809 London’s Royal Opera House opens.
1812 After destroying over three-quarters of the city, the Great Fire of Moscow burns out.
1864 Explorer John Speke, 37, the first white man to reach the source of the Nile, kills himself in a shooting accident.
1893 New Zealand becomes the first country to grant women the right to vote.
1899 The first British troops leave Bombay for South Africa to fight the Boers.
1906 A typhoon kills 10 000 in Hong Kong.
1939 Lord Haw-Haw makes his first Nazi propaganda broadcast. The American-born, Anglo-Irish Fascist politician (real name William Joyce) would later hang for it.
1944 The submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoes a Japanese freighter, Junyō Maru, killing 5 600 slave labourers and Allied prisoners of war.
1974 Hurricane Fifi slams into Honduras, killing 5 000 people.
1947 America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officially comes into existence.
1977 Voyager I, launched that same year, takes the first distant photograph of the Earth and the moon together. It and its sister are destined – perhaps eternally – Nasa says, to wander the Milky Way.
1992 More than 70 000 mourners gather in King William’s Town to pay their respects to the victims of the Bisho Massacre.
1998 Gang member Kevin Williams dies in the regional court in Stellenbosch when his throat is slit while the court is in session.
2015 The government of Uttar Pradesh, India, confirms that 2.3 million people applied for 238 menial office jobs.
2012 10 Turkish soldiers are killed and 70 injured in missile attack by Kurdish militants in Bingol, Turkey
2018 The Constitutional Court legalises cannabis use by adults in private places.
2020 Cyclone Ianos, a rare medicane (Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone) begins, sweeping across Greece and killing three people.
2022 Typhoon Nanmadol, one of the biggest to ever strike Japan, makes landfall on Kyushu island, with winds of 180km/h, forcing four million people to evacuate.