On this day: Apollo 14 landed on the Moon

On this day in 1971 astronaut Alan B Shepard holds a US flag on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 14 mission. Picture: Getty

1792: Tippoo of Mysore, India, was defeated in war with British, and Hyderabad ceded half of Mysore to British. He resumed hostilities in 1798-99.

1811: The Prince of Wales became Prince Regent on the established chronic porphyria of George III.

1850: Frank S Baldwin patented the first adding machine. It was 20 inches high and weighed 8lb.

1918: Church and state in Russia were officially separated.

1924: The BBC “pips” or time signals from Greenwich Observatory were heard for the first time.

1931: Captain Malcolm Campbell, driving Bluebird, set world land speed record of 245mph at Daytona Beach. He was first man to exceed 200mph.

1936: Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times premiered in America.

1962: The conjunction of Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn was watched with interest by astronomers. In India, Hindu weddings were cancelled as people waited for doomsday.

1967: The Musicians’ Union banned the Rolling Stones’s Let’s Spend The Night Together from the Eamonn Andrews TV show.

1971: Astronauts from US Apollo 14 landed on the Moon.

1982: Laker Airlines, created by former British pilot Sir Freddie Laker to cut prices and make air travel more accessible, collapsed with debts of £270 million.

1989: Sky Television, headed by Rupert Murdoch, launched the first four of its six planned channels.

1994: A controversial last-minute penalty gave England a 15-14 win over Scotland in the Calcutta Cup match at Murrayfield.

1997: The so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announced the creation of a $71m fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.

2000: Russian forces massacred at least 60 civilians in the Novye Aldi suburb of Grozny, Chechnya.

2002: Two pilots found guilty of “gross negligence” by the Ministry of Defence after the Mull of Kintyre Chinook helicopter crash, in which 29 people died, were cleared by a specially constituted House of Lords committee.

2004: Twenty-three Chinese people drowned when 35 cockle-pickers were trapped by rising tides in Morecambe Bay, England; 21 bodies were recovered.

2009: The Bank of England reduced interest rates to a record low of 1 per cent from 1.5 per cent in an attempt to boost the shrinking economy.

BIRTHDAYS

Charlotte Rampling OBE, actress, 68; Bobby Brown, singer, 45; Sven-Göran Eriksson, football coach, 66; Russell Grant, astrologer, 63; Christopher Guest (Nigel Tufnel), actor, writer, director and musician, 66; Barbara Hershey, actress, 66; Susan Hill CBE, novelist and playwright, 72; Jennifer Jason Leigh, actress, 52; Michael Mann, film director, 71; Jose-Maria Olazabal, golfer, 48; Cristiano Ronaldo, footballer, 29; Michael Sheen OBE, actor, 45.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1788 Sir Robert Peel, three times prime minister, and founder of Conservative Party; 1840 John Boyd Dunlop, Scottish veterinary surgeon and patentee of pneumatic tyre; 1840 Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, American inventor of first fully automatic machine-gun; 1914 William Burroughs, writer; 1920 Frank Muir, writer and broadcaster.

Deaths: 1881 Thomas Carlyle, essayist and historian; 1988 Emeric Pressburger, film producer; 2010 Ian Carmichael OBE, actor.