Posted in White History on May 22nd, 2013
1897 The Blackwall Tunnel, underneath the River Thames in east London, officially opened. It links the London Borough of Tower Hamlets with the London Borough of Greenwich. 1859 Scottish physician and writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh. He is best known for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally [...]
Posted in White History on May 21st, 2013
1932 American aviator Amelia Earhart completed the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean by a woman. She flew from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, intending to land in Paris. But bad weather forced her to land in a field at Culmore, north of Derry, Northern Ireland. When a farm hand asked, “Have you flown far?” [...]
Posted in White History on May 20th, 2013
1799 French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac was born in Tours. He is best known for writing La Comédie humaine, a sequence of almost 100 novels, short stories and plays which present a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815. He is regarded as one of [...]
Posted in White History on May 19th, 2013
1971 Russia launched the Mars 2 space probe, consisting of an orbiter and an attached lander. It was the first human artifact to impact the surface of Mars. After entering the atmosphere, the descent system on the module malfunctioned, possibly because the angle of entry was too steep. The descent sequence did not operate as [...]
Posted in White History on May 18th, 2013
1969 NASA launched Apollo 10, the fourth manned mission in the American Apollo space program, crewed by Commander Thomas P. Stafford, Command Module Pilot John W. Young, and Lunar Module Pilot Eugene A. Cernan. Its purpose was to be a “dry run” for the Apollo 11 mission, testing all of the procedures and components of [...]