Person report

★05 Jul 1841
Thomas Cook, founder of the travel company Thomas Cook & Son, organised his first excursion, escorting about 500 people from Leicester to Loughborough.

★30 Mar 1842
American physician Crawford Long became the first person to use diethyl ether as an anesthetic in a surgical procedure.

★20 Feb 1846
Polish insurgents led an uprising in the Free City of Kraków to incite a fight for national independence that was put down by the Austrian Empire nine days later.

★05 May 1864
American Civil War: Union Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's Overland Campaign in Virginia began with the Battle of the Wilderness in Spotsylvania County.

★22 Aug 1864
Under the leadership of Henry Dunant and the International Red Cross Committee, twelve European nations signed the First Geneva Convention, establishing the rules for protection of the victims of armed conflicts.

★27 May 1874
The first group of nomadic pastoralists known as Trekboere set out on the Dorsland Trek, departing South Africa for Angola.

★26 Dec 1898
At the French Academy of Sciences, physicists Pierre and Marie Curie announced the discovery of a new element, naming it radium.

★10 Dec 1907
During the Brown Dog affair, about 1,000 protesters marched through London and then clashed with 400 police officers in Trafalgar Square over the existence of a memorial for animals that had been vivisected.

★29 Mar 1911
The M1911 single-action, semi-automatic pistol developed by American firearms designer John Browning became the standard-issue side arm in the United States Army.

★24 Apr 1916
Irish republicans led by Patrick Pearse began the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland, and proclaimed the Irish Republic an independent state.

Historical data by Wikipedia Contributors CC BY-SA 3.0.