28 OCTOBER

1216 Henry III was crowned. His son was England's warrior king, Edward I.

1492 Christopher Columbus discovers Cuba and claims it for Spain

1538 The first university in the New World, the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, is established on Hispaniola

1636 A vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony establishes the first college in what would become the United States, today known as Harvard University.

1664 The Corps of Her Majesty's Royal Marines, commonly referred to as the Royal Marines, was established. It was originally known as The Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot.

1746 Peruvian cities of Lima and Callao demolished by earthquake, 18,000 die

1794 The birth of Robert Liston, Scottish physician who carried out Britain's first operation with the aid of an anaesthetic.

1831 English physicist Michael Faraday demonstrated the dynamo, founding the science of electro-magnetism.

1886 In New York Harbor, President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty.

1893 HMS Havelock, the Royal Navy's first destroyer, went on trials.

1904 St Louis police try a new investigation method - fingerprints

1912 The birth of Sir (William) Richard Doll, English physician and cancer researcher who first proved the link between cigarette smoking and cancer.

1915 Richard Strauss conducts the first performance of his tone poem "Eine Alpensinfonie" in Berlin.

1919 Volstead Act passed by US Congress, establishing prohibition, despite President Woodrow Wilson's veto

1922 March on Rome: Italian fascists led by Benito Mussolini march on Rome and take over the Italian government.

1924 Miner M.de Bruin discovers the infant fossil skull, "Taung child" in a lime quarry in Taung, South Africa. Paleoanthropologist Raymond Dart identifies the fossil as a new hominin species, Australopithecus africanus.

1929 1929 1st child born in aircraft, Miami, Florida

1930 The birth of Bernie Ecclestone English business magnate who is generally considered the primary authority in Formula One motor racing. His early involvement in the sport was as a competitor and then manager and, in 1972, he bought the Brabham team, which he ran for fifteen years. As a team owner he became a member of the Formula One Constructors' Association.

1938 David Dimbleby, TV journalist and commentator was born.

1949 The glove puppet Sooty, with Harry Corbett, made his first appearance on BBC TV.

1958 The State Opening of Parliament was televised for the first time.

1959 The first use of a car phone, with a call from Cheshire to London. A mere twenty five people had paid the astronomical sum of £200 each for one of the phones.

1962 The opening of Britain's first urban motorway - the M62 (now M60) around Manchester.

1962 End of Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev orders the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.

1965 Construction on the St. Louis Arch is completed.

1971 The House of Commons backed Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath and, by a majority of 112, voted for Britain to apply to join the EEC - the European Economic Community.

1974 Sports Minister Denis Howell's wife and young son survived a bomb attack on their car. The attack was thought to be the work of the Provisional IRA and the first on a serving minister during the current IRA campaign.

1979 Chairman Hua Kuo-Feng, the first Chinese leader to visit Britain, was welcomed at Heathrow by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. (Additional note - Margaret Thatcher was born at this former grocer's shop in Grantham Lincolnshire.

2000 Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble narrowly won party support to keep a Northern Ireland power sharing government alive.

2005 Plame affair: Lewis Libby, Vice-president Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is indicted in the Valerie Plame case. Libby resigns later that day.

2007 Cristina Fernández de Kirchner becomes the first woman elected President of Argentina.

2011 Commonwealth leaders pledged to amend legislation dating back to the 17th century to allow daughters of the monarch to take precedence over younger sons in the line of succession.

2011 Vincent Tabak, a 33 year old Dutch engineer with an obsession for violent *** and ****ography, was found guilty of strangling landscape architect Joanna Yeates for ***ual thrills. Her body was found, covered with leaves on Christmas morning 2010. The police initially suspected and arrested Christopher Jefferies, Yeates' landlord, who lived in a flat in the same building. The nature of press reporting on aspects of the case led to 'substantial, undisclosed libel damages' from eight newspapers being awarded to Mr. Jefferies.

2014 105 year old Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved 669 children, most of them Jews, from the Nazis was awarded the Czech Republic's highest state honour, the Order of the White Lion. He was aged 29 when he arranged trains to take the children out of occupied Czechoslovakia and for foster families to meet them in London.

2014 Tesco's Aberystwyth store made a blunder on a Welsh sign which was supposed to advertise 'free money' from the supermarket's cashpoint. The sign read "codiad am ddim", meaning free erections when it should read "arian am ddim" which means free money.

Famous Birthday's

Jonas Salk
(1914 - 1995)

Evelyn A Waugh
(1903 - 1966)

Bill Gates
62nd Birthday

Julia Roberts
50th Birthday

Hank Marvin
76th Birthday

Dennis Lillie
68th Birthday

Wayne Fontana
72nd Birthday

Cleo Laine
90th Birthday

Famous Deaths

Maxentius
( - 312)

John Locke
(1632 - 1704)

Abigail Adams
(1744 - 1818)

John Wallis
(1617 - 1703)

Ted Hughes
(1930 - 1998)

Famous Weddings

1533 Prince Henry of France (later Henry II) (14) marries Florentine noblewoman Catherine de' Medici (14)

1863 Painter Edouard Manet (31) weds Suzanne Leenhoff (34)

1869 Sarawak's head of state Charles Brooke (40) weds Margaret Alice Lili de Windt (20) at Highworth, Wiltshire

1981 Film director David Lean (73) weds fifth wife Sandra Hotz

2004 Economist Joseph Stiglitz (61) weds professor Anya Schiffrin (41) at the Municipal Building in New York