April 13 – Some important events on this day
837 👉🏼 Best view of Halley’s Comet in 2,000 years ☄️
1250 👉🏼 The Seventh Crusade is defeated in Egypt, Louis IX of France captured
1560 👉🏼 Giovanni, son of Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano is executed for poisoning his wife, despite his father’s efforts to save him.
Well-known for his achievements in algebra, especially as the first mathematician to make systematic use of numbers less than zero, Girolamo Cardano was one of the fathers of probability, discovering the binomial coefficients and the binomial theorem as detailed in his book “Opus novum de proportionibus.”
1598 👉🏼 Edict of Nantes grants political rights to French Huguenots
1741 👉🏼 Dutch people protest poor quality of bread 🥖
1742 👉🏼 George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” performed for the 1st time at New Music Hall in Dublin. ✔️READ THE ARTICLE!
1796 👉🏼 First elephant arrives in US from India 🐘
1796 👉🏼 Battle of Millesimo, Italy: Napoleon’s forces defeat allied armies of Austria and of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont.
1860 👉🏼 1st Pony Express reaches Sacramento, California
1868 👉🏼 Abyssinian War ends as British and Indian troops capture Magdala and Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II commits suicide.
In 1862 the Ethiopian Emperor, Tewodros II, was in a precarious position as ruler. Much of his country was in revolt against him, and he controlled a small strip of territory that included a fort at the city of Magdala.
In an attempt to solve these problems and retain power he wrote a letter to several European powers, asking for assistance. He sent a letter also to Queen Victoria asking for solidarity with his Christian kingdom, but he did not receive a response.
In order to get the attention of the British government he imprisoned several important British representatives. This caused the government in London to order an expedition to punish the emperor, transporting a large force hundreds of miles over mountainous terrain with no infrastructure.
As the British laid siege to his fortress at Magdala, Tewodros committed suicide with a pistol given to him as a gift by Queen Victoria, rather than face imprisonment. The British had won a resounding victory but the conflict was later described as one of the most ‘expensive affairs of honour in history.’
1870 👉🏼 Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.
The brainchild of American expatriates in Paris and a number of wealthy New Yorkers, the Met would not put on an exhibition until 1872, but it quickly blossomed into one of the world’s premier repositories of fine art, a position it holds to this day.
The Met acquired its first object, a Roman sarcophagus, the following November. Today, the Met is not only one of the leading artistic and social institutions in New York but one of the best-known and most-visited museums in the world, hosting around 7 million visitors a year.
1919 👉🏼 British and Gurkha troops massacre at least 379 of unarmed demonstrators in Amritsar Massacre, at the Jallianwala Bagh, a city park. Most of those killed were Indian nationalists meeting to protest the British government’s forced conscription of Indian soldiers and the heavy war tax imposed against the Indian people.
1928 👉🏼 1st trans atlantic flight Europe-US (Fitzmaurice-von Hunefeld-Köhl). ✔️READ THE ARTICLE!
1933 👉🏼 1st flight over Mount Everest (Lord Clydesdale)
1960 👉🏼 France becomes 4th nuclear nation exploding an A-Bomb in Sahara
1964 👉🏼 New Zealander Colin Bosher shears a record 565 sheep in 1 work day
1970 👉🏼 Apollo 13 announces “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here”, as Beech-built oxygen tank explodes en route to Moon. 🌝
1992 👉🏼 Magnitude 5.5 earthquake hits Netherlands 🇳🇱