February 4 was a momentous day in many respects throughout the years. These are the most notable events.
169 A strong earthquake strikes the coast of Sicily, causing tens of thousands of casualties.
1555 John Rogers is burned at the stake, becoming the first English Protestant martyr under the rule of Bloody Mary (Queen Mary I of England).
1703 In Edo (Tokyo), all but one of the 47 Ronin commit seppuku (ritual suicide) as recompense for avenging their master’s death.
1742 Construction of a breakwater begins in Table Bay.
1838 Zulu king Dingane cedes ‘the place called Port Natal together with all the land annexed from the sea to the north’ to Voortrekker leader Piet Retief ‘and his countrymen’.
1861 Apache chief Cochise is arrested in Arizona by the US Army for raiding a ranch. He escapes and declares war, beginning the the Apache Wars, which last for 25 years.
1893 Professor Raymond Dart, SA anthropologist and expert on the Taung skull, is born in Toowong, Australia.
1902 Aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh is born in Detroit, Michigan. He made the first non-stop solo flight from New York to Paris.
1920 South Africans Pierre van Ryneveld and Quintin Brand take off from Brooklands in Surrey in their converted Vickers Vimy bomber, Silver Queen, hoping to become the first airmen to fly from England to Cape Town.
1945 The Yalta Conference between the ‘Big Three’, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, opens in the Crimea to discuss World War II’s final phase.
1976 In Guatemala and Honduras an earthquake kills more than 22 000 people.
1988 Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega is indicted by a US jury for drug trafficking and racketeering.
1998 Bill Gates gets a pie thrown in his face in Brussels, Belgium, by Noël Godin in a ‘symbolic attack against hierarchical power itself’.
2004 Having stolen the idea from fellow Harvard students Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook.
2013 Paris, France, annuls a 213-year-old law banning women from wearing trousers.
2022 Cyclone Batsirai strikes Madagascar two weeks after deadly Cyclone Ana, causing widespread damage, killing at least 92 people and displacing 91 000.