What happened this week in history

In 1715, The Riot Act, which prohibited gatherings of more than 12 people, took effect.
Lincolnshire MP Sir Edward Leigh celebrates his 66th birthday this week  EMN-160718-075602001Lincolnshire MP Sir Edward Leigh celebrates his 66th birthday this week  EMN-160718-075602001
Lincolnshire MP Sir Edward Leigh celebrates his 66th birthday this week EMN-160718-075602001

1837 - London’s first railway station, Euston, opened.

1872 - Mahlon Loomis received a patent for the wireless.

1885 - Professional football was legalised in Britain, although a number of clubs admitted they had already been paying their players.

1940 - The government decreed the sale of new cars should cease for the remainder of the war.

1941 - The ‘V for Victory’ campaign was launched in Britain.

1944 - German staff officer Colonel von Stauffenburg attempted to assassinate Hitler in Rastenburg.

1951 - King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem.

1954 - Elvis Presley gave his first public performance on a truck outside a chemist in Memphis.

1960 - Sirimavo Bandaranaike, widow of Ceylon’s assassinated prime minister Solomon Bandaranaike, became the world’s first woman prime minister.

1960 - The Polaris missile was successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time.

1962 - The world’s first passenger hovercraft service started across the estuary of the River Dee.

1964 - Nasa tested its first successful rocket engine.

1968 - In a radio interview, actress Jane Asher announced her engagement to Paul McCartney was off. She had neglected to tell him first.

1969 - American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin landed on the Moon.

1976 - The first close-ups of Mars were sent back to Earth from the American Viking Spacecraft.

1982 - Eight soldiers on ceremonial duty in London’s Hyde Park and St James’ Park were killed by two IRA bomb blasts. Seven horses also died.

1999 - A woman took command of a Nasa space shuttle for the first time. Eileen Collins led a five-person crew on the shuttle Columbia.

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