#TodayInHistory – March 12

March 12 – Some Important Events on this day

538 👉🏼 Witiges, King of the Ostrogoths, ends his siege of Rome, retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of victorious Byzantine General Belisarius
1455 👉🏼First record of Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible, letter dated this day by Enea Silvio Piccolomini refers to the bible printed a year before 📖
1642 👉🏼 Explorer and seafarer Abel Tasman is the 1st European to sight New Zealand, viewing the north-west coast of the South Island 🇳🇿
1832 👉🏼 The ballet La Sylphide first premieres at the Opéra de Paris 🇫🇷
1857 👉🏼 Giuseppe Verdi’s opera “Simon Boccanegra” premieres in Venice 🇮🇹
1860 👉🏼 Congress accepts Pre-emption Bill: free land in West for colonists
1881 👉🏼 Andrew Watson makes his Scotland debut as the world’s first black international football player and captain 🏈

1894 👉🏼 Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time in a candy store in Vicksburg, Mississippi 🥤
Coca-Cola was initially only sold by the glass from soda fountains because of a belief in the health properties of carbonated water. The first person to bottle Coca-Cola was Joseph A. Biedenharn from his wholesale candy company in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1894. Biedenharn used a Hutchinson bottle with its patented stopper, very different from the later famous contour bottle, designed years later, in 1915.

1896 👉🏼 1st movie in Netherlands (Kalverstr 220) 🎥
1917 👉🏼 A German submarine sinks an unarmed US merchant ship, the ‘Algonquin’ on the same day that US President Woodrow Wilson gives executive order to arm US merchant ships 🚢
1930 👉🏼 Mohandas Gandhi begins 200m (300km) march protesting British salt tax
1994 👉🏼 Church of England ordains 1st 33 women priests