Today In History with The Retrospectors

The first images of Mars found their way back to Earth from NASA’s Mariner 4 mission on 15th July, 1965 - and were simultaneously revelatory and disappointing. Delivered as binary code, rendered in black and white, and revealing only 1% of the planet, the photos were coloured in by hand and showed no evidence of life. But they played a significant part in the scientific understanding of the Red Pl...

Cold-blooded killer? Folk hero? Petty thief? Billy The Kid, who met his end on 14th July, 1881, was all of the above. His luck finally ran out in a dark bedroom in New Mexico, where his old friend, Sheriff Pat Garrett, ensured that he would be the one to live to tell the tale. Born Henry McCarty but also known by numerous aliases like William H. Bonny and Kid Antrim, ‘The Kid’ was just 21 when he...

Mary Whitehouse successfully sued Gay News and publisher Denis Lemon at the Old Bailey in a trial that began on 11th July, 1977 - Britain’s last conviction for blasphemy. What had ired the notorious Christian campaigner was the magazine’s publication of “The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name”, a poem by James Kirkup written from the perspective of a Roman centurion who graphically describes having...

The ‘Abernathy Boys’, Temple and Louis, were aged just 5 and 8 respectively when they departed Guthrie, Oklahoma for a 1,300-mile horseback trip to Roswell, New Mexico on July 10th, 1909. Alone. Sons of widower John Abernathy, himself the youngest-ever U.S. Marshal, the boys encountered wolves, outlaws and vast stretches of untamed plains on their journey - but survived the trip and became nationa...

Rock Around The Clock was a moderately successful B-side - until its inclusion in the teen rebellion movie Blackboard Jungle - following which, on 9th July, 1955, Bill Haley and the Comets’ earworm became the first rock n’roll song to hit US No.1. But Haley was no teenage rebel. He was already in his late 30s, balding, and rocking a curl on his forehead that screamed “respectable uncle”. But he wa...

‘Our Lady of Kazan’, a painting of the Virgin and Child, was discovered in the ashes of a fire in the Russian town of Kazan on 8th July, 1579. The icon quickly became associated with miracles after two blind men were said to have their sight restored by standing in front of it. The original was stolen in 1904, but the copies still represent one of Russia’s most important pieces of religious art -...

Samantha Smith, an 11 year-old from Maine, New England, left for the USSR on 7th July, 1983, as the personal guest of Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov. Her adventure began with a letter she wrote him, bluntly asking if he intended to start a war or conquer the United States. After the letter was published in Pravda, Andropov invited her to visit Russia, attending the Bolshoi Ballet, touring Lenin's To...

Jack Johnson, the first Black world heavyweight champion, and Jim Jeffries, the so-called "Great White Hope", slugged it out in Reno, Nevada on 4th July, 1910 - in one of the most explosive sporting events in American sports history. Literally billed as a battle for racial supremacy, the fight attracted 20,000 paying fans - and sparked the biggest race riots in the United States until the death of...

David Bowie retired his alter-ego Ziggy Stardust live on stage at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on 3rd July, 1973. To the surprise of most of his band, the Spiders From Mars, he announced to a devastated crowd that the gig was “the last show we’ll ever do.”  Bowie’s management company had plans to take Ziggy on an international tour, but being Ziggy Stardust had taken a mental and physical toll on th...

Minnesotan dentist Walter Palmer killed Cecil The Lion on 2nd July, 2015; ending the life of a beloved and photogenic big cat, and kickstarting his career as the internet’s most vilified trophy hunter. Cecil, who lived in Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, wasn’t just any lion - he was being tracked by Oxford scientists, and was a hit with tourists, known for his majestic black mane and his chill at...

Sony’s revolutionary cassette player, the Walkman, debuted in the USA on 1st July, 1979, costing $150. It went on to shift a staggering 450m units. Boasting a classy aluminium chassis, audio splitter, and novelty ‘Hotline’ button for dance parties, the device took off after an advertising campaign featuring sexy models and an elderly Japanese monk. In this episode, Olly, Arion and Rebecca reveal t...

Margaret Mitchell’s first and only novel, Gone With The Wind, was released on 30th June, 1936, and delighted readers and critics alike, shifting millions of copies and scooping the Pulitzer Prize. But its romanticised tales of life in the South - complete with glorified depictions of slave labour and the Confederate Army - was divisive for African-Americans at the time, and is now recognised as ov...

The deadly fight between Patrick Farrell and James Donnelly on 27th June 1857 kickstarted one of the longest-lasting and most violent feuds in Canadian history. The property the Donnellys had been squatting on had been previously leased by Farrell. A judge had ruled that the lot be split 50/50, but, at a barn raising bee, Donnelly chucked a handspike at Farrell, who died two days later. Decades la...

At a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a packet of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum became the first ever product to have its barcode scanned - at 8:01 a.m. on June 26th, 1974. Inspired by the morse code training of his Boy Scout days, Norman Joseph Woodland first sketched out a barcode on a Florida beach in 1948, drawing dots and dashes in the sand. Together with fellow Drexel Institute graduate student...

Architect Stanford White was shot three times at close range by millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw during a performance of Broadway comedy ‘Mamzelle Champagne’ on 25th June, 1906. At first, the stunned audience thought it was part of the show. Thaw claimed White had “ruined” his wife, showgirl Evelyn Nesbit - often called America’s first ‘It Girl’ - who at just 16 had been lured into White’s orbit and...

‘Dancing Mania’ - in which people spontaneously danced to exhaustion, some until they broke their ribs and subsequently died, took hold of Aachen, Germany on 24th June, 1374. We still don’t really know why. Had the victims ingested ergot, a mould from rye bread that can inspire hallucinations? Was it a hysterical mass response to a stressful and traumatic environment? Or a kind of pre-smartphone f...

John Gotti, the infamous ‘Teflon Don’ boss of New York’s Gambino crime family, smiled as he received a life sentence in a Brooklyn courthouse on 23rd June, 1992. Outside, chaos reigned as nearly a thousand supporters flipped over a federal marshal’s car and chanted in defence of the mobster, framing his conviction as an anti-Italian injustice. But the FBI had been determined to bring Gotti down. A...

When the East India Company surrendered Fort William (in modern-day Kolkata) to the Nawab of Bengal on 20th June, 1756, dozens of British captives were imprisoned in a cell measuring only 18ft long and 14ft wide, with just two tiny windows - ‘the Black Hole of Calcutta’. Among the prisoners was John Zephaniah Holwell, whose pamphlet describing the terrors of the airless room caused a sensation bac...

The Grand Knockout Tournament (also known as It’s a Royal Knockout) was a one-off charity event first shown on BBC1 on 19th June 1987, to an audience of 18 million gobsmacked viewers.  The brainchild of the then 23 year old Prince Edward, the slapstick spectacle featured the Princess Royal and the Duke and Duchess of York captaining rival teams in a series of preposterous rounds involving celebrit...

Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air on June 18th, 1928… but on this occasion didn’t actually fly the plane; she was a passenger aboard the Friendship, a three-engine seaplane piloted by Wilmer Stultz and co-piloted by Louis Gordon.  Originally, a wealthy heiress was meant to take the flight, but her family vetoed it as too dangerous. So Earhart, smar...

Still the tallest statue in the USA, the Statue of Liberty arrived from France - in no less than 214 crates - in New York City on 17th June, 1885. Costing just $10m in today’s money, the Lady went on to symbolise the immigrant journey - even though the designers and engineers behind it had no such intention. And it wasn’t supposed to be green, either - that’s because it’s oxidized. In this episode...

Russia’s brightest ballet star, Rudolf Nureyev, evaded his KGB minders and defected from the USSR on 16th June, 1961. According to feverish newspaper reports, the dancer dashed towards the barrier, proclaiming in English, "I want to be free," and was swiftly escorted to the airport police station, marking the start of his life in the West. His defection, while fraught with personal sacrifice - inc...

Until the mid-20th century, putting nappies on babies involved folding and pinning cloth towelling, then pulling a pair of rubber pants over the top. That all began to change on June 12th, 1951, when the US inventor Marion Donovan patented a new kind of nappy, with an envelope-like plastic cover and an absorbent insert. Her invention ultimately netted her a million dollars (nearly $10 million in t...

Paul McCartney married Heather Mills in an extravagant ceremony at Castle Leslie in County Monaghan, Ireland, on 11th June, 2002.  300 VIP guests were in attendance, including Elton John, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr, but only one official photo was ever released - so local teens with disposable cameras became unlikely paparazzi for hire.  The couple’s doomed love story began in 1999 at the Pride...

The Oxford v Cambridge Men’s Boat Race has been an annual tradition since 1856 - but the first one was the result of a light-hearted bet between two friends called Charles on 10th June, 1829. When Wordsworth (Christ Church College, Oxford) and Merivale (St. John’s, Cambridge) challenged each other to race up the Thames in Henley, they never could have known their schoolboy jape would attract 20,00...