ON THIS DAY JUNE 18
1178 Five monks at Canterbury report an explosion on the moon.
1815 The Duke of Wellington’s combined forces beat Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.
1940 Winston Churchill delivers his ‘this was their finest hour’ speech, urging perseverance.
1942 French glider pilot Eric Nessler stays aloft for 38 hours.
1959 Louisiana Governor Earl Long is sent to a state mental hospital. He has the hospital’s director fired and is then found to be ‘sane’.
1980 Shakuntala Devi sets a world record by mentally multiplying two random 13-digit numbers in 28 seconds. Her answer, 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 = 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730.
1983 Space shuttle Challenger launches the first American woman into space, astronaut Sally Ride. Of the 93 women who have been to space (including commercial space travellers), the first was cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, followed by Svetlana Savitskaya, then Ride. Over 670 people have crossed the Kármán line (the edge of space); 19 have died in five separate incidents, 3 in actual space. A memorial on the Moon has names of those killed before 1971. Of the 24 men who have been to the Moon, 12 have walked on it, but no women. That is set to change when Christina Koch orbits it this year and Nasa says the next to be on the lunar surface will be a woman.
1991 Mud storm in Antofagasta Chile, kills 80.
1995 All Black Jonah Lomu scores the try of the Rugby World Cup, running over South African-born England fullback Mike Catt.
2015 Selfishness is to blame for global warming, says Pope Francis.
2020 A lighting flash of 17.1 seconds during thunderstorm over Uruguay and Argentina 2019 China has been forcefully harvesting organs from marginalized groups in prison camps on a significant scale according to International Tribunal in London.
2019 Two 14 year-old boys become the youngest in Irish history to be convicted of murder when found guilty of the murder and sexual assault of a 14 year-old girl in Dublin.
2023 The Titan submersible implodes over the wreck of the Titanic, killing all 5 occupants and sparking a huge search-and-rescue effort.