28 October

10 weird and wonderful things which happened on 28 October:

 

1. On this date in 1998 Jonathan Capewell, 16, died from inhaling deodorant fumes because of his obsession with personal hygiene, an inquest heard. He was so obsessed with smelling nice that he'd cover his entire body in spray deodorant at least twice a day.
2. The glove puppet character Sooty, with Harry Corbett, made his first appearance on BBC television on this date in 1949.
3. Ernest Hemingway won Nobel prize for literature on this date in 1954.
4. In 1996, Steve MacDonald, aged 24, became the first blind man to paddle a canoe around the British mainland.
5. In 312, Roman emperor Constantine defeated the army of Maxentius, a contender to the throne, at Milvian Bridge. He'd seen a vision of the cross, inscribed with the words, "In this sign conquer." Constantine became a Christian soon after, the first Roman emperor to embrace the Christian faith.
6. In 1929, the Dow Jones dropped 38.33 points, or 12.82%, to 260.64. The US Stock Exchange collapsed, starting the Great Depression, and a world economic crisis.
7. In 1636, America's first university was founded. Harvard was named after John Harvard, the English-born Puritan minister who bequeathed £779 and a 300 volume library.
8. In 1884, The Times of London reported that in a life boat on the open sea, a cabin boy named Richard Parker had been eaten by the three surviving crew members of the wrecked vessel Mignonette. In 1838, Edgar Allen Poe had published a story called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym which told of a shipwreck in which a sailor was eaten. His name was also Richard Parker.
9. In 1886, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland, in the presence of its sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, as a monument to democracy. France had paid for the statue, the US for the pedestal. The statue took 9 years to complete and was presented by France to the US to mark the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The dedication was celebrated by the first ticker tape parade in New York.
10. In 1997, a judge in Perugia dismissed charges of fraud against a registered blind man who was found to have a driving licence. The man said he had travelled to Lourdes the previous December and been cured.

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