May 19 – Some important events on this day
1182 👉🏼 The high altar of Paris cathedral Notre Dame is consecrated by Cardinal Henri de Château-Marçay and Maurice de Sully
1536 👉🏼 Anne Boleyn, second wife of English King Henry VIII, is beheaded at the Tower of London on charges of adultery, incest and treason.
1643 👉🏼 Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Harbor form the United Colonies of New England
1649 👉🏼 England is declared a Commonwealth by an act of the Rump Parliament making England a republic for the next 11 years
1780 👉🏼 About midday, near-total darkness descends on New England, now known to be caused by forest fires in Canada 🇨🇦
1885 👉🏼 German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck takes possession of Cameroon and Togoland
1885 👉🏼 1st mass production of shoes (Jan Matzeliger in Lynn, Massachusetts) 👞
1896 👉🏼 1st auto (Karl Benz) arrives in Netherlands.
Karl Benz was a German engine designer and engineer, regarded as the inventor of the first automobile powered by an internal combustion engine.
While contemporaries of Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach were working on similar engines at the same time, it was Benz who received a patent for his work first. Subsequently Benz would go on to patent all the processes necessary to make the internal combustion engine feasible for use in an automobile. Benz along with his wife Bertha founded the Mercedes-Benz company to commercialize this technology and still today It is one of the world’s leading luxury car brands.
1897 👉🏼 Poet and playwright Oscar Wilde is released after two years in prison. His experiences in prison were the basis for his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).
1898 👉🏼 US Congress passes the Private Mailing Card Act, allowing private publishers and printers to produce postcards, had to be labelled “Private Mailing Cards” until 1901, known as “souvenir cards”
1919 👉🏼 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk lands at Samsun on the Black Sea coast, beginning the Turkish War of Independence
1995 👉🏼 World’s youngest doctor, Balamurali Ambati, 17, graduates Mount Sinai 👨🏼⚕️
2016 👉🏼 66 passengers and crew flying from Cairo to Paris on EgyptAir flight 804 disappeared over the Mediterranean Sea. ✈️
2161 👉🏼 Syzygy: 8 of 9 planets aligned on same side of sun 🌞