On This Day…

1520 – Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan begins crossing the Pacific Ocean.
1814 – The Times of London first printed by automatic, steam-powered presses built by German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer – makes newspapers available to a mass audience.
1872 – Wilhelm Reiss became the first climber to reach the top of Cotopaxi, the world’s highest active volcano, in Ecuador.
1893 – Women vote in a national election for the first time, in the New Zealand general election.
1908 – French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, a leading exponent of structuralism, was born in Belgium.
1919 – US-born Lady Nancy Astor elected as the 1st female member of British House of Commons.
1967 – 1st radio pulsars detected by British postgraduate Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor Antony Hewish at Cambridge University.
1990 – Conservative Party chooses John Major to succeed Margaret Thatcher as the leader and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Film: 2012 – Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, the first in a series of movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, had its world premiere in New Zealand.

Via Britannica / On This Day