On this day: Barings Bank trader Nick Leeson jailed

Barings Bank trader Nick Leeson was jailed in 1995 for his role in the banks £860 million collapse. Picture: AFP/Getty Images

1697: The rebuilt St Paul’s Cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, consecrated for us.

1755: the second Eddystone Lighthouse was destroyed by fire.

1802: Britain sold Suriname to the Netherlands.

1804: Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself Emperor Napoleon I of France.

1815: Britain and Rajah of Nepal signed peace treaty.

1840: William Henry Harrison was elected ninth US president.

1852: Second French Empire proclaimed, with Napoleon III as emperor.

1867: Charles Dickens gave his first public reading in the US at a theatre in New York.

1875: Gelignite was patented by Nobel Peace Prize founder Alfred Nobel.

1899: USA and Germany agreed to devide Samoa between them.

1901: King Camp Gillette patented the safety razor, and nearly went bankrupt, selling only 51 in his first year of trading.

1916: The lights of the Statue of Liberty were turned on by US president Woodrow Wilson.

1917: World’s first aircraft carrier, HMS Argus, launched.

1929: Britain’s first public telephone boxes came into service.

1932: The Adventures of Charlie Chan was first heard in a broadcast on NBC-Blue radio netwrork.

1933: Fred Astaire’s first film released, with leading lady Joan Crawford. It was called Dancing Lady and the studio’s report on Fred read: “Can’t act, can’t sing, balding, can dance a little”.

1941: All single women aged 20-30 were called up for war work.

1942: The world’s first nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated at the University of Chicago, by physicists Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton.

1950: The United Nations gave Eritrea to Ethiopia.

1961: Fidel Castro announced that he was a Marxist and would lead Cuba to Communism.

1966: Prime Minister Harold Wilson met Ian Smith on HMS Tiger off Gibraltar for talks on the independence of Rhodesia.

1971: The Trucial States (the sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf), declared independence from the UK as Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujeira, Sharjah and Umm Ak Qiwain, formed the United Arab Emirates.

1982: World’s first artificial heart was fitted, to a dentist, Dr Barney Clark, at University of Utah Medical Centre. He survived for six months.

1990: Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s centre-right coalition won crushing victory in first all-German elections since 1932.

1991: Shares in Robert Maxwell’s public companies, Mirror Group Newspapers and Maxwell Communication Corporation, were suspended as City concern mounted over his private finances.

1993: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar shot and killed in Medellin.

1995: Barings Bank trader Nick Leeson jailed for six and a half years in Singapore for his role in the bank’s £860 million collapse.

1999: The UK devolved political power in Northern Ireland to the Northern Ireland Executive.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1837 Doctor Joseph Bell, Edinburgh doctor (believed to be the prototype of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes); 1848 Mary Slessor, Aberdeen-born missionary in Nigeria; 1899 John Cobb, British racing driver; 1914 Ray Walston, actor; 1915 Randolph A Hearst, newspaper publisher; 1917 Sylvia Sims, American jazz singer; 1923 Maria Callas, opera singer; 1925 Julie Harris, actress; 1946 Gianni Versace, fashion designer.

Deaths: 1547 Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico; 1814 the Marquis de Sade, aristocrat; 1859 John Brown, anti-slavery activist; 1936 John Ringling, circus owner; 1982 Marty Feldman, comedy writer, comedian and actor; 1985 Philip Larkin, poet and librarian; 1986 Desi Arnaz, musican, actor, TV producer; 1997 Shirley Crabtree, wrestler (“Big Daddy”); 2008 Patrick Maitland, 17th Earl of Lauderdale, journalist, MP 1951-1959; 2009 Maggie Jones, actress (Coronation Street).