Today in History – What Happened on the 6th of June?

Today is 6 June 2006. On This Day in…

1727 – In the middle of a performance of Bononcini’s opera “Astianatte” in front of the Princess of Wales in London, the two greatest sopranos of the day, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, came to blows. After calling each “B….” and “W….” the two women fell upon each other with “hair-pulling and fisticuffs”. The opera season for the year closed early immediately after the performance.

1816 – In “the year without a summer” between 10 and 20 inches (25 to 50 cm) of snow fell in New England in what should have been summer in the United States. That year snow or frost continued to arrive every month through the summer across the United States. The unusual weather is thought to have been a result of the eruption of Tambora (in Indonesia) the year before, the most explosive eruption of the last 10,000 years when between 37 to 100 cubic miles of dust, ash and cinders were blown into the atmosphere causing a globe-encircling curtain of dust which took some 3 years to finally settle.

1844 – The YMCA, the Young Men’s Christian Association, was founded in London by George Williams, a draper’s assistant who lived with 140 other young men in lodgings provided by their employer. Starting with prayer meetings in his room, it quickly drew in other lonely Christians who had left home to work in London in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

1907 – The first self-acting washing powder in the world went on sale when an advertisement appeared in the “Dusseldorfer Zeitung” for Persil.

1933 – The first drive-in movie theatre opened by Richard Hollingshead off Wilson Boulevard in Camden, New Jersey on a 10 acre lot which had room for 500 cars. The movie was “Wife Beware” and admission was 25 cents per car plus 25 cents per person.

1944 – D-day. Allied forces invaded Normandy in the largest amphibious invasion in history. 150,000 troops, 5,000 ships and 10,000 aircraft took part.

1949 – George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” was published. Begun in 1945, he was going to call it “The Last Man in Europe” but decided to reverse the last two digits of the year he finished writing it – 1948 – and call it “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (not “1984” as is often used).

1988 – Three giant snapping turtles were found inside a Bronx sewage treatment plant in New York. Each weighed about 23 kgs and were thought to have been unwanted pets which were flushed down a toilet at some stage.