On this day, May 8

1828 International Red Cross founder and Nobel Prize winner Henri Dunant is born in Geneva. He was also a founder of the YMCA.

1879 George Selden files the first patent for a petrol-driven car.

1886 Invented by Atlanta doctor and pharmacist John Pemberton, a carbonated beverage named Coca-Cola is sold as a patent medicine in Jacob’s Pharmacy, Atlanta. Its two key ingredients were cocaine and caffeine.

1933 Mohandas Gandhi begins a 21-day fast in protest against British oppression in India.

1942 Gunners of the Ceylon Garrison Artillery on Horsburgh Island, in the Cocos Islands, rebel. Their mutiny is crushed and three are executed. The are the only British Commonwealth soldiers to be executed for mutiny during World War II.

1945 A second German surrender ceremony is held in Berlin. Soviet leader Josef Stalin refuses to recognise the German surrender document, signed a day earlier. At the second ceremony, German Field-Marshal Keitel signs the surrender document, which declares hostilities will end at 12:01am on May 9.

1947 Polish resistance fighter Witold Pilecki, who had volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz to gather information about the Holocaust, is arrested by the communist police.1978 The first ascent of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen is completed by Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler.

1980 The World Health Organisation confirms the eradication of smallpox.

1987 The SAS kills eight Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers and a civilian in an ambush in Loughgall, Northern Ireland.

2006 The most publicised court case since apartheid ends when Johannesburg Supreme Court judge, Justice Willem van der Merwe pronounces Jacob Zuma not guilty of rape.

2013 Sir Alex Ferguson announces his retirement as Manchester United’s manager.

2023 171 trillion pieces of plastic litter the world’s oceans, up from 16 trillion in 2005, says scientists.

2024 A report by the Pentagon into UFOs since 1945 finds no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence