On This Day May 13

559 The corpse of Anabaptist and religious reformer David Jorisz is exhumed 3 years after his death and burned in Basel because he was declared a heretic after his death.

1637 Cardinal Richelieu of France creates the table knife to cure dinner guests of the habit of picking their teeth with their knife-points. Later, King Louis XIV banned pointed knives at his table to reduce violence.

1767 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Apollo et Hyacinthus, written when he was 11 years old, premieres in Salzburg,

1787 Eleven ships full of convicts leave Portsmouth to set up a penal colony in Australia. They resupply at Cape Town.

1835 King Hintsa ka Phalo of the Xhosa nation is killed by British troops.

1912 The Royal Flying Corps, forerunner of the Royal Air Force, is established.

1940 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivers this famous line in the House of Commons: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

1950 The first Formula One motor race is held at Silverstone. Giuseppe Farina wins in an Alfa.

1958 Velcro is registered as a trade mark.1993 A gas explosion kills 53 Secunda miners.

1995 Alison Hargreaves is the first woman to climb Everest without oxygen or sherpas.

2000 A Dutch fireworks factory explodes in Enschede, killing 22 people, wounding 950 others, and causing €450 million in damage.

2019 Businessman Victor Vescovo makes the deepest dive ever to the bottom of the Mariana trench at 10 927m, and finds a sweet wrappers and a plastic bag. He is the first person to have been to both the top of all the world’s continents and the bottom of all its oceans. He has also skied the Last Degree of Latitude at both the North and South poles, thus completing the Explorers’ Grand Slam.

2020 Every African country records cases of Covid-19 as Lesotho becomes the last to get it.

2021 World’s largest iceberg, A-76 (4,320km² – four times the size of New York), calves off the Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica. Researchers discover an ancient, living endemic ecosystem beneath its glacial coating. The entire ecosystem contains different microbial organisms able to survive the harsh conditions.