1848: In order to take over as the inaugural Anglican bishop of Cape Town, Bishop Robert Gray travels to South Africa.
1859: Abraham Smit is listed as the registered owner of the farm Turffontein in the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. In 1886, the property was developed as Johannesburg’s first neighborhood.
1877: Swan Lake, a ballet by Tchaikovsky, premieres in Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre.
1913: King O’Malley, a politician, is responsible for driving in the first survey peg in Canberra’s construction, which is a compromise between rival capital cities Sydney and Melbourne. Being a fully designed capital city outside of any state, akin to Washington, DC, or BrasÃlia, Brazil, makes it unique.
1943: A Mexican farmer is shocked to see the emergence of the volcano Paracutin amid his corn while he is tending his fields. CNN named the 424-meter-tall cone one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World in 1997.
1943: At Kasserine Pass in North Africa, German Field-Marshal Erwin Rommel breaches American defenses while inexperienced US forces lose their first significant fight of World War II in Europe, resulting in the deaths of 1,000 Americans.
1947: 42 city blocks are destroyed in an explosion at an electroplating factory in Los Angeles due to a mistake in chemical mixing.
1962: John Glenn, an astronaut, becomes the first American to be propelled into orbit. In a trip that lasts little under five hours, he ascends to 260 kilometers and completes three orbits in the “Friendship 7” spacecraft. Prior to him, Alan Shepard and Virgil “Gus” Grissom had both accomplished brief suborbital flights, making him the third American in space. All of them had been surpassed by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who became the first person in space on April 12, 1961, after completing one orbit. This achievement heightened tensions in the continuing Space Race between the US and Russia. In 1998, Glenn, then 77 years old, made another flight on the space shuttle Discovery.
1988: In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there are 500 fatalities as a result of heavy rains.
2002: 373 people die in an Egyptian train fire that occurs between Cairo and Luxor.
In 2012, researchers successfully recreated the flowering plant Silene stenophylla using a fruit that was 31,000 years old.
2022 sees the start of energy production at Africa’s most contentious and expansive hydroelectric project on the Blue Nile, the Grand Renaissance Dam (Gerd) in Ethiopia.
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