On this day

1814 - The first steam locomotive was demonstrated by George Stephenson.

1872 - Black worms rained from the sky over Bucharest in Romania.

1917 - Mata Hari was sentenced to death after being found guilty of spying. She was said to have used affairs with military men to pass secrets to the Germans.

1929 - Pope Pius XI became the first Pope to Leave the Vatican since 1870.

1946 - The USA began using Bikini Atoll in the Pacific nuclear tests.

1971 - Christian Barnard carried out his first combined heart and lung transplant.

1984 - Russian cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space.

1994 - Jordan's King Hussein and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin ended 46 years of fighting when they signed a peace agreement.

1995 - A bomb exploded on the train at the St Michel Metro station in Paris, killing seven people.

1995 - The International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia formally charged the Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic, the Croatian Serb President, Milan Martic, and 21 others with genocide and crimes against humanity.

2000 - A Concorde burst into flames and crashed on take-off from Paris. It was the first ever accident involving Concorde in its 31-year history, during which time it had carried more than 2.5 million people.