Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.
1606 Guy Fawkes is executed for trying to blow up England’s king and its parliament.
1849 David Draper, prospector and geologist, is born in Cape Town. He discovered underground water at Zuurbekom in 1898, thus alleviating frequent water shortages in Johannesburg.
1851 American Gail Borden announces the invention of condensed milk – much loved by troepies in the army.
1901 Boer generals Smuts and Liebenberg capture Modderfontein, Transvaal.
1915 Germany is the first country to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare.
1930 3M begins marketing Scotch Tape.
1943 German Field-Marshal Friedrich Paulus surrenders to the Soviets at Stalingrad, ending one of World War II’s fiercest battles.
1945 About 3 000 inmates from the Nazi’s Stutthof concentration camp are marched into the Baltic Sea and executed so they can’t be liberated.
1968 Nauru gains independence from Australia and becomes the smallest republic and third-smallest state in the world, behind only Vatican City and Monaco.
1971 Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell, aboard a Saturn V rocket, lift off for the Fra Mauro Highlands on the moon with a South African flag.
1983 A new law in the UK requires drivers and front-seat passengers to wear seatbelts.
1985 President PW Botha offers to free Nelson Mandela if he renounces violence.
1996 An explosives-filled truck rams the gates of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka in Colombo, killing 86 people and injuring 1 400.
2012 The Toyota Corolla is recognised as the best-selling car of all time, with sales of over 37.5 million units.
2015 Lydia Ko, 17, becomes the youngest person in golf history to be ranked No 1 in the world.
2018 A 19-year old Indonesian is rescued after 49 days adrift at sea on a floating fish trap. The small wooden hut was anchored to the seabed by a long rope and suspended by buoys, but heavy winds snapped its moorings.
2019 Colonisation of the Americas in the late 1500s killed so many people that it cooled the planet and led to a ‘Little Ice Age’, according to a scientific report published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
2019 A gunman kills seven people and injures 22 during a high-speed chase in Odessa, Texas.
2020 The UK formally withdraws from the European Union (Brexit).
2022 The UN’s weather agency predicts a rare “triple dip” La Nina pattern to last until the end of 2022, which is likely to extend droughts in the Horn of Africa and South America.