Today In History with The Retrospectors

Following a successful early career, Rembrandt van Rijn filed for ‘cessie van goede’ (insolvency) on July 26th, 1656. The poor management of his finances magnified other difficulties that he had with family, friends, neighbours, and patrons.  Although Rembrandt’s bankruptcy was part of a scheme that purported to shield his house from his creditors, and pass it on to his family, he leant uncomforta...

The Hovercraft SR-N1, piloted by Captain Peter Lamb, sailed from Calais to Dover on 25th July 1959, fifty years to the day after Louis Blériot made the first crossing of the English Channel. It took 2 hours, 3 minutes.  The brainchild of British engineer and inventor Christopher Cockerell, Hovercraft was described as a cross between an aircraft, a boat and a land vehicle, hovering just above the w...

The ‘Quietly Confident Quartet’ of Mark Tonelli (backstroke), Peter Evans (breaststroke), Mark Kerry (butterfly), and Neil Brooks (freestyle) won Gold in the 4 × 100 metres medley relay at the Summer Olympics in Moscow on 24th July, 1980: the only time the United States had not won the event. It was Australia’s first Gold medal for eight years, but reaction back home to the swimmers’ astonishing v...

The fire that destroyed the second Temple of Artemis - one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world - was supposedly set on the day Alexander the Great was born: 21st July, 356 BC. The story goes that the arsonist, Herosratus, was simply seeking notoriety. Herostratus was captured and tortured on the rack, where he confessed to having committed the arson in an attempt to immortalize his name. To...

Rerun. France’s Jewish population mostly had no family surnames – until 20th July, 1808, when Napoleon issued a decree insisting they adopted one. They were not permitted to choose place names, and allusions to the Old Testament were forbidden. Rumours persist that some families were charged higher fees to adopt prettier names, but in a Europe rife with antisemitism, Napoleon’s creations of Jewish...

The boys who brought surfing to California were Hawaiian princes Jonah Kūhiō Kalanianaʻole, David Kawānanakoa, and Edward Keliʻiahonui, who took a break from military school on 19th July, 1885, to surf the waves at Santa Cruz.  The royal trio fashioned surfboards out of redwood and surfed at the San Lorenzo river mouth, demonstrating the centuries-old Polynesian tradition to stunned and delighted...

Tim Berners-Lee uploaded a photo of parody doo-wop group Les Horrible Cernettes on 18th July 1992 - the first image to be shared online. The photograph was taken at the CERN Hardronic Festival by Silvano de Gennaro, an analyst in the Computer Science department. The girlband were striking a pose for their forthcoming CD cover, little realising their comedy love songs about colliders, quarks, liqui...

Windsor became the official surname of the British Royal family on 17th July 1917, when King George V issued a proclamation declaring that “The Name of Windsor is to be borne by His Royal House and Family and Relinquishing the Use of All German Titles and Dignities.” The decision to change the family name came amid strong anti-German feeling following air raids over London, and in particular the b...

Dynamite was invented by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, who demonstrated it in Britain for the first time on 14th July, 1867. He had discovered that when nitroglycerin, an explosive liquid, was absorbed by kieselguhr, a porous siliceous earth, it produced a solid that was resistant to shock but readily detonable by heat or percussion, making it safer to handle. Nobel named his invention “dynamite”...

Rerun. Queen Victoria moved from her birthplace, Kensington Palace, and decreed Buckingham Palace her official residence on 13th July, 1837. She was 18, newly-crowned – and until then had shared a bedroom with her mother. Built in 1703 for the Duke of Buckingham, the Palace had never previously permanently housed anyone, and was reportedly drafty, dirty, and staffed by ‘slovenly’ servants. But, yo...

A deputized posse illegally kidnapped and deported over a thousand striking mine workers from Bisbee, Arizona on July 12, 1917, and dumped them in New Mexico: an event that became known as The Bisbee Deportation.  The action was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge, the major mining company in the area, which provided lists of workers and others who were to be arrested to the Cochise County sheriff, Harry...

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...

Pinocchio, ‘The Story of a Puppet’, debuted in Giornale per i bambini, an Italian weekly magazine for children, on 7th July, 1881. Its author, Carlo Lorenzini - going by the pseudonym C. Collodi - intended the tale to end with the hanging of Pinocchio, but popular demand led to the character having further, more optimistic adventures. As a young man, Collodi joined the seminary but left to support...

The AK-47 assault rifle, the 20th century’s deadliest weapon, went into production on 6th July, 1947.  Designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov, then a 22 year-old tank sergeant, the 600rpm gun was the winning entry in a national competition to find the next generation of Soviet weapons. It went on to be used in conflicts as diverse as Vietnam, Cuba and Iraq. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explai...

Rerun. Amazon, created in the Seattle garage of Jeff Bezos, was incorporated on 5th July, 1994.  Before Bezos had settled on the site’s name as a way of conveying the size and scope of the e-commerce platform he intended to build, his working titles had included Cadabra, Relentless, Awake, Browse and Bookmall. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain why Washington was chosen as the launch...

Fourteen years of food rationing came to an end in Britain on 4th July, 1954, when restrictions on the sale and purchase of meat and bacon were lifted. Members of the London Housewives’ Association held a special ceremony in London’s Trafalgar Square to mark Derationing Day. Meanwhile, The Minister of Fuel and Power, Geoffrey Lloyd, burned a large replica of a ration book. Rationing had been intro...

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...

Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, were among the prominent figures discussing Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution at the Oxford University Museum on 30th June 1860; an encounter sometimes referred to as ‘The Great Debate’.  The confrontation is best remembered for a heated exchange in which Wilberforce supposedly asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his gra...

Rerun. Marshall Mathers III, aka Eminem, was sued for defamation by his own mother, Debbie, on 29th June, 2000. The suit was primarily in response to a lyric, “My Mom does more dope than I do”, from his hit song ‘My Name Is’. However, the case never made it to court. Eminem settled for $25,000 - almost of all of which went to Debbie’s lawyer, who then commented that the cash was not enough to comp...

America’s first programme to feature an all-black cast, Amos 'n' Andy premiered on CBS on June 28th, 1951. Despite being based on one of the most popular radio shows of all time, the series lasted only two years, following a barrage of criticism. Although popular with many African-Americans, the show traded on ethnic caricatures, and the prejudices of its white creators. The NAACP mounted a formal...

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...

Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband John Wayne Bobbitt’s penis with a kitchen knife while he was asleep in their apartment in Manassas, Virginia on 23rd June, 1993. After a nine-hour surgery, Bobbitt’s penis was successfully reattached - and the case became an international news sensation. The 24 year-old manicurist was charged with malicious wounding and faced up to 20 years in prison if convicted...

John McEnroe was once the world’s No.1 tennis player, winning seven major Grand Slams. But he’ll always be remembered for his extraordinary rant against umpire Edward James at Wimbledon on 22nd June, 1981. During his match with Tom Gullikson, James ruled that the New Yorker’s serve went out. McEnroe’s reaction – “You can’t be serious man, you cannot be serious!… You guys are the absolute pits of t...