1423: King Louis XI of France was born. He once commanded a pigs' choir to be formed. So a courtier rigged up a keyboard connected to a row of spikes. When you pressed a key, a spiked pig would squeal. In the 1938 movie "If I Were King" Louis was played by Oscar-nominated Basil Rathbone.

1842: Police rounded up 60 hunchbacks in a search for the failed assassin of Queen Victoria. He had pointed a pistol at her carriage, but it only clicked, for it was not loaded. Culprit John Bean was jailed for 18 months.

1886: The first Linotype machine went into service in New York. It replaced the old hand-setting method and revolutionised the print industry by setting a whole "line o' type" from commands typed in at a keyboard.

1898: Joshua Slocum arrived back in the US, three years after leaving with a dollar fifty in his pocket. He and his tiny sailing boat Spray had made the first-ever solo circumnavigation of the globe - and he was a non-swimmer!

1916: "Witch of Wall Street" Hetty Green died. She was 80 years old and the richest woman in the US, worth $100 million. But she always dressed in rags and lived in flop-houses.

1936: At Lord's cricket ground, a ball from a fast bowler killed a sparrow in flight. The bird, now stuffed, is in the museum there.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.