15 fascinating, stimulating things that happened on December 28
169BC The menorah is lit to rededicate the Holy Temple of Jerusalem after two centuries of foreign rule and religious oppression and a seven-year revolt. The menorah burns for eight days without the sufficient fuel needed to do so, giving birth to the holiday Hanukkah.
1065 Londons’ Westminster Abbey is consecrated.
1700 Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel lays the first bricks of an octagonal church, the tower of which still forms part of the Groote Kerk in Cape Town.
1849 M Jolly-Bellin discovers dry-cleaning when he upsets a lamp containing turpentine and oil on his clothing and sees the cleansing effect.
1879 Scotland’s River Tay bridge collapses as a train passes over it, killing 75 people.
1909 Frenchman Albert Kimmerling makes the first powered flight in South Africa when he reaches a height of 6m in East London.
1921 Following a drop in the world price of gold, the Rand Revolt begins with a strike by miners after the announcement of wage reductions on the coal and gold mines and the weakening of the colour bar to allow the promotion of black miners to skilled and supervisory positions.
1943 All Kalmyk inhabitants of the Republic of Kalmukkie deported by the Soviet Union to Central Asia and Siberia. Many die en route.
1963 Scottish Lotus driver Jim Clark wins his record seventh Grand Prix of the F1 season on the Prince George Circuit in East London.
1972 The skeleton of Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, is found in Berlin.
1976 Winnie Mandela is banished to Brandfort.
1984 Carbon-14 dating shows that King Clone – a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert, in southern California – is 11 700 years old, making it one of the oldest living things.
2014 AirAsia Flight 8501 crashes in the Karimata Strait off Indonesia, killing 162 people.
2016 Actress Debbie Reynolds dies of a stroke, the day after her daughter, the Star Wars actress, Carrie Fisher, dies.
2019 The Jihadist fundamentalist group al-Shabaab sets off a truck bomb in Mogadishu, Somalia, killing at least 84 people and wounding over 150. | The Historian
