1990 - Hubble Space Telescope takes off. NASA launched Space Shuttle Discovery from Cape Carnaveral to carry the telescope into it's orbit 380 miles above the earth. The telescope is capable of capturing images that happened 14 billion years ago. Dogged by problems it has had several upgrades including those carried out during a record 5 space walks in a single shuttle flight. There are also two cameras - one which can achieve image resolutions 10 times greater than that of even the largest Earth-based telescope, and a second which can detect an object 50 times fainter than anything visible from Earth.
(Almost forgot ) 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland. Armed rebellion instigated by a small number of IRB and members of the Irish Volunteers. The focus point of the rebellion was in Dublin and was to last for seven days before the surrender of the rebels to the British forces. Although the rising was a complete failure and all the leaders ,with one exception, was shot; the nationalist movement in Ireland gained significant support in the weeks following the rebellion due to poor decisions made by the British authorities(and well planned nationalist propaganda). This political upheaval due to the new found support for the nationalist movement was to prove crucial in the events leading up to the outbreak of the War of Independence.
1945 - Hamburg radio announces the death of Adolf Hitler. *At 2230 local time a newsreader announced that reports from the Fuhrer's headquarters said Hitler had "fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany". *In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill would not make a statement to the Commons about the war situation in Europe except to say it was "definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago". *from BBC History webiste. 1994 - Ayrton Senna killed in car crash Ayrton died during a race at Imola in Italy, he was just 34 years old. His Williams car was doing 192 mph at the time when it crashed into a concrete wall. The day before, the Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger was killed at nearly the same spot, known as the Tamburello curve.
1886 It was on this day in 1886 that Pharmacist John Styth Pemberton first sold a carbonated beverage called "Coca-Cola" as a potent medicine. In it's first year the company sold an average of nine glasses a day, but now sells it's product to 200 countries world wide. Coca-cola was headed for 60 years by Robert Woodruff, a marketing genius. Woodruff took coca-cola across the world and in 1928 the Americans took it with them to the Olympic Games in Amsterdam. In 1941 the Americans entered the Second World War. Woodruff ordered that "every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for 5 cents, wherever he is, and whatever it costs the Company." In 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower sent an urgent cablegram to Coca-Cola, requesting shipment of materials for 10 bottling plants. During the war, many people enjoyed their first taste of the beverage, and when peace finally came, the foundations were laid for Coca-Cola to do business overseas. The rest as they say is history. http://heritage.coca-cola.com/
