1778: Sir Humphrey Davy, chemist and inventor of the miner’s safety lamp, was born in Penzance.
1849: Thomas and William Bowler, felt hatmakers, sold their first bowler.
1903: The Wright brothers made the first successful controlled flight in a powered aircraft at Kill Devil Hill, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
1939: The German battleship Admiral Graf Spee was scuttled off Montevideo, Uruguay, after the Battle of the River Plate.
1973: More than 30 people died after Arab guerrillas hijacked a West German airliner at Rome Airport.
1983: An IRA car bomb killed three police and three Christmas shoppers, and injured scores of others outside Harrods in London’s Knightsbridge.
1986: Mrs Davina Thompson created medical history when at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge she was given a new heart, lungs and liver.
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