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-American War.

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 Great War dies. Sapper Robert Arthur Hislop, right, 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 Berlin Wall 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, right, 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.

Birthdays

James Gillray, UK cartoonist (1756-1815); William Gisborne, NZ politician (1825-98); Annie Oakley, US sharp shooter (1860-1926); Walter Bolton, last person executed in NZ (1888-1957); John Logie Baird, UK inventor (1888-1946); Alfred Hitchcock, UK film director (1899-1980); Ben Hogan, US golfer (1912-97); Peter Beaven, NZ architect (1925-2012); Fidel Castro, Cuban leader (1926-2016); Janet Yellen, US Treasury Secretary (1946-); Philippe Petit, French high-wire walker (1949-); Feargal Sharkey, Irish singer (1958-); Phil Taylor, UK darts player (1960-); Shane Cortese, NZ actor (1968-); Alan Shearer, UK footballer (1970-); Shoaib Akhtar, Pakistani cricketer (1975-); Tim Mikkelson, NZ rugby sevens player (1986-).