2024-10-20 22:27:00
1824: The Englishman Joseph Aspdin receives a patent for the Portland cement he developed.
1879: The American inventor Thomas Alva Edison developed the first technically and economically viable light bulb. Its carbon filament bulb burns for 40 hours.
1914: Turkey enters the war on the side of the Central Powers. War Minister Enver Pasha, leader of the Young Turk movement, becomes deputy commander of the army and fleet. To compensate for financial losses caused by the closure of the straits, Germany provided the Ottoman government with gold bars worth £200 million once war was declared.
1919: The National Assembly in Vienna determines the state name “Republic of Austria”. In implementation of the Treaty of Saint-Germain, the decision of November 12, 1918 (“German Austria is a part of the German Empire”) is repealed.
1939: A German-Italian “option agreement” signed in Rome regulates the resettlement of German-speaking South Tyroleans to the German Reich. Of the 213,000 optants, around 75,000 are actually resettled.
1944: Aachen is the first major German city to be taken by American troops.
1944: Yugoslav partisans liberate Dubrovnik.
1949: In Beijing, the communist politician Zhou Enlai is appointed the first Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of China. He held the office until his death in 1976.
1959: The Guggenheim Museum, founded by the American industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim, opens on New York’s Fifth Avenue. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece houses the valuable Guggenheim collection of modern art.
1964: The feature film “My Fair Lady” starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison (director: George Cukor) is being released in cinemas in the USA.
1969: Willy Brandt is the first Social Democrat to be elected Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Bundestag in Bonn. He replaces the Christian Democrat Kurt Georg Kiesinger and forms an SPD-FDP coalition government with FDP leader Walter Scheel as Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor.
1974: The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), chaired by President Yasser Arafat, receives observer status at the United Nations. France’s Foreign Minister Jean Sauvagnargues is the first representative of a Western European government to meet with the PLO leader.
1979: Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Dayan resigns in protest against Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s rigid stance.
1984: In the state elections in Vorarlberg, the Greens under Kaspanaze Simma received 13 percent of the votes and entered an Austrian state parliament for the first time.
1994: Government representatives from North Korea and the USA sign an agreement in Geneva in which the government in Pyongyang commits to freezing its nuclear program.
1999: Alexander Van der Bellen takes over the chairmanship of the Green Parliamentary Club from Madeleine Petrovic.
1999: A rocket attack by the Russian army kills 137 people and injures over 250 others in a market square in the Chechen capital Grozny.
2004: More than 1,000 students demonstrate in Vienna against the study conditions at universities. The protest was initiated by the department of study at the Journalism Institute. The journalism students’ dissatisfaction was sparked by the supervision situation at their institute, as a result of which the teachers no longer accepted registrations for thesis topics. A few days later, an agreement was reached to provide additional supervisors.
2009: Talks in Vienna at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) between the USA, Russia and France with Iran about its nuclear program end without an agreement. The issue was the possibility of Iran enriching nuclear fuel for a research reactor abroad.
2009: The Austrian National Council passes the “Repeal and Rehabilitation Act”, which rehabilitates all Wehrmacht deserters and other opponents and victims of persecution of the Nazi regime. All judgments of the Nazi People’s Court, the summary courts and the special courts between 1938 and 1945 are overturned.
Birthdays: Henri Guisan, black General (1874-1960); Kurt Rothschild, Eastern political economist (1914-2010); Franz Muhri, Eastern politician (1924-2001); Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, US writer (1929-2018); Lord Hugh Thomas of Swynnerton, British historian (1931-2017); Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel. Politician (1949); Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa, Crown Prince of Bahrain (1969).
Todestage: Andrés González-Blanco, Spanish writer (1888-1924); Jack Kerouac, US writer (1922-1969); François Truffaut, French film director (1932-1984); Heinz Czechowski, German writer (1935-2009); Heinz Fiedler, former central works council chairman of the ORF (1942-2014).
Name days: Ursula, Severin, Hilarion, Ottilie, Constanze, Clementine, Irmtraud, Cordula, Jakob, Matthäus.
1729468819
#October #Willy #Brandt #Social #Democrat #elected #Chancellor #Federal #Republic #Germany #Bundestag #Bonn
