On This Day

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Important events of history that took place in India and elsewhere on today’s date.

24 August

🇮🇳 In India

1600 The first ship of the East India Company, Hector, carrying the first official English representative to India, reached the coast of Surat.

1690 Calcutta city was established. Job Charnock set up East India Company HQ camp by Kalikata village (modern Calcutta, later Kolkata).

1889 K. Kelappan, freedom fighter, social reformer, revolutionary, educationist and journalist, was born in Calicut village in district Kerala.

1908 Shivaram Hari Rajguru, Indian revolutionary from Maharashtra, known mainly for his involvement in the assassination of a British Raj police officer named Saunders, was born.

1925 Sir Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar KCIE, Sanskrit scholar, orientalist, and social reformer, passed away at the age of 88.

1966 Mihir Sen swims the Gibralter channel.

1969 V V Giri became the fourth President of India.

1971 India beat England by four wickets in the Oval Cricket Test match to register their first win on the ground.

1974 Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed became the fifth President of India.

2000 The Calcutta Municipal Corporation celebrated the 310th birth anniversary of the city. A web portal on Calcutta was also launched on this occasion.

🌎 Elsewhere

0410 Rome overrun by Visigoths under Alaric I for the first time in nearly 800 years, seen as the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

1821 Mexico gained its independence from Spain with the Treaty of Cordoba.

1847 Charlotte Bronte, using the pseudonym Currer Bell, sends a manuscript of Jane Eyre to her publisher in London.

1891 Thomas Edison patents motion picture camera.

1929 Yasser Arafat, Egyptian-Palestinian engineer and politician, first President of the Palestinian National Authority, was born.

1932 First transcontinental non-stop flight by a woman, Amelia Earhart.

1947 Paulo Coelho, Brazilian author and songwriter, was born.

1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an intergovernmental military alliance between countries, entered into force, following the signing of its treaty four months earlier.

1977 John Green, American author and vlogger, was born.

1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; Ukraine declares its independence from USSR.

1995 Microsoft releases Windows 95, a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system built on top of MS-DOS.

2006 Pluto is downgraded to a dwarf planet when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefines the term "planet".

2011 Amid health issues, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, and he died less than two months later.

2015 Physicist Stephen Hawking presents a new theory on black holes at a lecture at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

2019 US adventurer Victor Vescovo becomes the first person to visit the deepest point of every ocean when he reaches Molloy Hole, in the Arctic.

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