What happened this week in history

1492 - Christopher Columbus had his first sight of land in the New World. He called it San Salvador.

1609 - The children’s rhyme Three Blind Mice was published in London.

1654 - An explosion in Delft killed Dutch painter Carel Fabritius, as he was working on a portrait. He was one of Rembrant’s best-known pupils and a teacher of Vermeer.

1823 - Charles Mackintosh began selling raincoats.

1849 - Charles Rowley patented the safety pin in the UK. It had already been patented in America.

1901 - American President Theodore Roosevelt renamed the Executive Mansion The White House.

1915 - British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by a German firing squad for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium.

1928 - The first iron lung was used at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts.

1928 - The Great Zeppelin, the world’s first transatlantic airship, embarked on its maiden flight in Germany.

1933 - Alcatraz Island, in San Francisco Bay, became an unofficial federal prison.

1934 -The cheeseburger was invented at Kaelin’s Tavern in Kentucky.

1936 - A train-ferry service was launched between Dover and Dunkirk. Trains ran between London and Paris.

1948 - The first Morris Minor was produced at Cowley in Oxfordshire.

1964 - The Soviet Union launched the Voskhod 1 into orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight without space suits.

1984 - The IRA bombed the Tory party conference at the Grand Hotel in Brighton. Five people died and 34 were injured.

1986 - Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to visit China.

1989 - The remains of Shakespeare’s original Globe Theatre were found on London’s Bankside.

2001 - The United Nations and its Secretary General, Kofi Annan, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.