ON THIS DAY JUNE 8
452 Italy is invaded by Attila the Hun, one of Europe’s most feared enemies.
632 Muhammad, founder of Islam (PBUH), dies in Medina. He was 61 or 62 and is viewed as the final prophet of God in all the main branches of Islam.
1783 Laki, a volcano in Iceland, begins an eight-month eruption which kills 10 000 people and starts a widespread seven-year famine throughout Asia and Europe.
1786 Commercially made ice-cream is first advertised, in New York.
1794 Radical democrat and key figure in the French Revolution Robespierre inaugurates the revolution’s state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being.
1824 The washing machine is patented, in Quebec.
1856 A group of 194 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty, arrive at Norfolk Island for resettlement.
1938 Schoolboy Gert Terblanche discovers fossils of an unknown “robust-type” human ancestor, named Paranthropus robustus, at Kromdraai, near Sterkfontein.
1942 Japanese submarines shell Sydney and Newcastle, Australia.
1943 The two-day Battle of Porta between the Royal Italian Army and the Greek People’s Liberation Army begins with 250 Greek partisans overcoming 5 000 Italian soldiers. Italy’s poor performance in Greece leads to the German army invading the country.
1949 George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is published.
1972 Phan Thị Kim Phúc, 9, is burned by napalm. A photographer snaps her moments later as the screaming young girl runs down a road. The image, Napalm Girl, conveys the horrors of war in a way that words cannot. It becomes a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo.
1982 Argentinian air attacks on British landing ships kill 56 UK servicemen in the Falklands. 1986 Alleged Nazi Kurt Waldheim, a former UN secretary-general, is elected president of Austria.
1995 Downed US Air Force pilot Captain Scott O’Grady is rescued by US Marines in Bosnia. 1996 Revival of the procession of Lady Godiva, who according to legend, rode on her horse naked through the streets of Coventry on Market Day. Her husband, Leofric, Earl of Mercia, had demanded an oppressive tax from Coventry citizens. Godiva pleaded for him to stop. Leofric supposedly said: “You will have to ride naked through Coventry before I change my ways.” Beforehand, Godiva asked residents to stay in their homes to preserve her modesty. She rode with her long hair draped over her body. However, one man, now known as Peeping Tom, peeped. Legend has it he was instantly blinded.
2018 Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, which can process 200 000 trillion calculations per second, is unveiled. 2020 Former astronaut Kathy Sullivan is the first woman to reach the deepest point of the ocean – Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench. She was formerly the first American woman to spacewalk.