On this day: First jumbo jet arrival at Heathrow Airport

1970: First jumbo jet arrival at Heathrow Airport, London, with 362 passengers. Picture: Keystone

1368: Coronation of Zhu Yuanzhang as emperor of China, marking the beginning of the Ming dynasty rule which lasted for three centuries.

1562: Licence granted for lead-mining in Upper Clydesdale.

1570: The Earl of Moray, regent of Scotland, was assassinated.

1571: Queen Elizabeth I opened the Royal Exchange in London.

1643: Sir Thomas Fairfax took Leeds for the Parliamentarians during the English Civil War.

1668: England and Holland signed Alliance of The Hague.

1719: Liechtenstein became a sovereign state of the Holy Roman Empire.

1790: The Bounty mutineers landed on Pitcairn Island, with Fletcher Christian.

1849: Elizabeth Blackwell, from Bristol, became first woman doctor when she graduated from Medical School of Geneva, New York State.

1920: Netherlands refused to surrender Germany’s former Kaiser William II to Allies for punishment as First World War criminal.

1924: Ramsay MacDonald became the Labour Party’s first prime minister.

1937: Seventeen Communist leaders confessed in Moscow that they conspired with Leon Trotsky to undermine Soviet regime of Josef Stalin.

1950: Israel’s Knesset resolved that Jerusalem would be the nation’s capital.

1970: First jumbo jet arrival at Heathrow Airport, London, with 362 passengers. The airport could not cope with the extra luggage, and much of it went astray.

1973: US president Richard Nixon announced that accord had been reached in Vietnam War.

1973: A volcanic eruption occurred without warning on the Icelandic island of Eldfell, and almost resulted in the permanent evacuation of the island.

1978: Sweden became the first country to ban aerosol sprays, believed to be causing damage to the earth’s ozone layer.

1979: Space Invaders game first seen in Britain, exhibited at London’s Amusement Trade Exhibition. Within 12 months, 70,000 had been sold.

1985: House of Lords debate was televised live for the first time.

1997: Madeleine Albright became the first woman to serve as United States Secretary of State.

2002: “American Taleban”  John Walker Lindh returned  to the US in FBI custody.

2002: Reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan and subsequently murdered.

2008: The chestnut tree that Anne Frank wrote about in her diary as she hid from the Nazis during the Second World War in Amsterdam was saved. The diseased tree had been deemed dangerous by the authorities and was due to be chopped down.

2009: Figures revealed that the United Kingdom was officially in recession after the economy saw its worst output performance since 1980 in the final three months of 2008.

2015: Salman bun Abdulaziz was crowned king of Saudi Arabia following the death of his half-brother King Abdullah.