April 20 was a momentous day.
Image: Sora
“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” – George Bernard Shaw
South Africa produces about 70% of the world’s macadamia nuts.
1862 First test of pasteurisation – used to heat food or drink, such as milk, to kill harmful bacteria and extend shelf life without significantly changing taste – is completed by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard.
1889 Adolf Hitler is born in Austria. As leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945, his war in Europe caused the deaths of about 50 million people.
1902 Marie and Pierre Curie isolate the radioactive element radium chloride.
1918 German air ace the Red Baron claims his 79th and 80th victims, his last aerial victories.
1945 Adolf Hitler makes his last trip to the surface from his Berlin bunker to award Iron Crosses to boy soldiers of the Hitler Youth.
1968 SAA Pretoria, a Boeing 707 with 122 people on board, crashes just after take-off from Windhoek. Only five people survive.
1978 Korean Air Lines Flight 902, from Paris to Seoul, is shot down in Soviet airspace. Fired on by a Soviet jet, two passengers are killed. The plane makes an emergency landing on a frozen lake near the Finnish border.
1999 Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold kill 13 people and injure 24, then commit suicide in the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado.
2010 The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers and beginning a six-month oil spill.
2018 Arsène Wenger says he will leave Arsenal after 22 years as the club’s manager.
2018 King Mswati III of Swaziland changes the name of the country to eSwatini (land of the Swati).
2021 Former US police officer Derek Chauvin is convicted of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
2021 All six EPL clubs withdraw from the controversial European Super League just three days after it was announced – Chelsea, Manchester City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United and Tottenham.
2021 President of Chad for three decades, Idriss Déby is killed on the battlefield while fighting alongside his forces against rebels near the capital, N’Djamena.
2024 NASA engineers successfully repair and recode the space probe Voyager 1 – exploring space since 1977 – from 24.1 billion kilometres away, after five months of no data.
DAILY NEWS