Today in history

1521 – Spanish forces under Hernan Cortes capture Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire.

1792 – French revolutionaries imprison the royal family.

1814 – Britain agrees to hand back Dutch colonies seized during the Napoleonic wars – but not the Cape of Good Hope.

1898 – The US Army takes control of the Philippines port of Manila during the Spanish-AmericanWar.

1910 – Florence Nightingale, founder of modern nursing, dies in London aged 90.

1913 – Harry Brearley, of Sheffield, reputedly creates the first ‘‘stainless’’ steel, with a 12.8 per cent chromium content to resist rusting.

1914 – New Zealand’s first casualty of the GreatWar dies. Sapper Robert Arthur Hislop was guarding a railway bridge in Auckland when he fell, and died from his injuries six days later.

1937 – Japanese attack the Chinese city of Shanghai.

1942 – The US Manhattan Project begins, charged with delivering an atomic bomb.

1960 – The first two-way telephone conversation by satellite takes place with the help of Echo 1.

1961 – Construction of the BerlinWall begins with East German soldiers laying down barbed wire and bricks as a barrier between East Berlin and the western section.

2005 – David Lange, former NZ prime minister, dies, aged 63.

2012 – Nadzeya Ostapchuk, of Belarus, is stripped of her shot-put gold medal at the London Olympics after failing a drugs test. Valerie Adams, of New Zealand, is promoted to the gold.

2016 – US swimmer Michael Phelps wins the 23rd, and last, Olympic gold of his career in the 4×100m medley relay.

2020 – Israel strikes a historic deal with the United Arab Emirates to normalise relations between the two countries; President Donald Trump acknowledges starving the US Postal Service of money in order to make it harder to process an expected surge of mail-in ballots.