On this day: First tank tested and approved by British Army

1816: France decreed that the Bonaparte famly were excluded from the country forever.

1836: HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin on board, reached Sydney, Australia.

1866: The Royal Aeronautical Society was founded.

1872: Yohannes IV was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in Axum, the ancient capital – the first imperial coronation in the city for more than 200 years.

1875: Kwand-su became emperor of China.

1879: Lieutenant-General Shelmsford invaded Zululand as the British-Zulu War began in Africa.

1895: The National Trust was founded.

1896: The first X-ray photograph was made in the United States. Doctor Henry Louis Smith fired a bullet into a corpse and then took an exposure which, when developed, showed the exact location of the bullet.

1907: Britain granted responsible government to the former colony of Transvaal.

1916: The fighting tank was first tested and given official approval by British top brass. The army ordered 49.

1945: German forces withdrew in disorder in Battle of the Bulge.

1958: Soviet Union proposed zone free of nuclear weapons from Arctic Circle to Mediterranean.

1964: Revolution in Zanzibar, which was declared a republic; Sultan was banished.

1967: China’s army pledged support to Mao Tse Tung during disorders triggered by Chinese cultural revolution.

1974: North African nations of Libya and Tunisia announced they had agreed to merge as new republic.

1995: It was announced that troops were being withdrawn from daylight patrols in Belfast for the first time for 25 years.

1996: The bodies of 8,000 Muslims were found buried in an open-cast mine in Ljubija, in northern Bosnia.

1998: Nineteen European nations agreed to forbid human cloning.

2002: The Buttery, one Glasgow’s best restaurants for more than a century, ceased trading.

2006: Turkey released Mehmet Ali Agca from jail after he served 25 years for shooting Pope John Paul II.

2009: Kate Winslet won two Golden Globes in Los Angeles, best actress for Revolutionary Road and best supporting actress for The Reader.

2010: A massive 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, leaving 200,000 dead and three million affected.

2014: At the 71st Golden Globe awards, Woody Allen received the Cecil B DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.

ANNIVERSARIES

Births: 1628 Charles Perrault, French writer and collector of fairy tales, including Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots; 1729 Edmund Burke, statesman, philosopher and orator; 1822 Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir, French inventor of the first practical internal combustion engine; 1876 Jack London, American novelist; 1893 Hermann Goering, Nazi leader and Luftwaffe creator; 1899 Paul Muller, Swiss chemist who formulated DDT insecticide; 1907 Tex Ritter, actor; 1944 Joe Frazier, American boxer; 1960 Michael Hutchence, rock singer (INXS).

Deaths: 1625 Jan Brueghel, the Elder, painter; 1897 Sir Isaac Pitman, printer, publisher and inventor of shorthand system; 1976 Dame Agatha Christie, author of detective stories; 1994 Sir Alastair Currie, emeritus professor of pathology, Edinburgh University; 2001 Michael Williams, actor; 2003 Maurice Gibb, rock guitarist (Bee Gees); 2014 Alexandra Bastedo, British actress.