On This Day In History April 10

This is your morning Open Thread. Pour your favorite beverage and review the past and comment on the future.

Find the past “On This Day in History” here.

April 10 is the 100th day of the year (101st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 265 days remaining until the end of the year.

On this day in 1970, Paul McCartney announces the breakup of the Beatles.

The legendary rock band the Beatles spent the better part of three years breaking up in the late 1960s, and even longer than that hashing out who did what and why. And by the spring of 1970, there was little more than a tangled set of business relationships keeping the group together. Each of the Beatles was pursuing his musical interests outside of the band, and there were no plans in place to record together as a group. But as far as the public knew, this was just a temporary state of affairs. That all changed on April 10, 1970, when an ambiguous Paul McCartney “self-interview” was seized upon by the international media as an official announcement of a Beatles breakup.

The occasion for the statements Paul released to the press that day was the upcoming release of his debut solo album, McCartney. In a Q&A format in which he was both the interviewer and the interviewee, Paul first asked and answered a number of straightforward questions involving the recording equipment he used on the album, which instruments he played and who designed the artwork for the cover.

 428 – Nestorius becomes Patriarch of Constantinople.

837 – Halley’s Comet and Earth experienced their closest approach to one another when their separating distance equalled 0.0342 AU (3.2 million miles).

879 – Louis III becomes King of the Western Franks.

1407 – the lama Deshin Shekpa visits the Ming Dynasty capital at Nanjing. He is awarded with the title Great Treasure Prince of Dharma.

1500 – Ludovico Sforza is captured by the Swiss troops at Novara and is handed over to the French.

1606 – The Charter of the Virginia Company of London is established by royal charter by James I of England with the purpose of establishing colonial settlements in North America.

1710 – The Statute of Anne, the first law regulating copyright, enters into force in Great Britain.

1741 – War of the Austrian Succession: Prussia defeats Austria in the Battle of Mollwitz.

1815 – The Mount Tambora volcano begins a three-month-long eruption, lasting until July 15.

The eruption ultimately kills 71,000 people and affects Earth’s climate for the next two years.

1816 – The United States Government approves the creation of the Second Bank of the United States.

1821 – Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople is hanged by the Turks from the main gate of the Patriarchate and his body is thrown into the Bosphorus.

1826 – The 10,500 inhabitants of the Greek town Messolonghi start leaving the town after a year’s siege by Turkish forces. Very few of them survive.

1856 – The Theta Chi Fraternity is founded at Norwich University.

1858 – The original Big Ben, a 14.5 tonne bell for the Palace of Westminster is cast in Stockton-on-Tees by Warner’s of Cripplegate. This however cracked during testing and was recast into the 13.76 tonne bell by Whitechapel Bell Foundry and is still in use to date.

1864 – Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg is elected emperor of Mexico.

1865 – American Civil War: A day after his surrender to Union forces, Confederate General Robert E. Lee addresses his troops for the last time.

1866 – The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is founded in New York City by Henry Bergh.

1868 – At Arogee in Abyssinia, British and Indian forces defeat an army of Emperor Tewodros II. While 700 Ethiopians are killed and many more injured, only two die from the British/Indian troops.

1874 – The first Arbor Day is celebrated in Nebraska.

1887 – On Easter Sunday, Pope Leo XIII authorizes the establishment of The Catholic University of America.

1904 – British mystic Aleister Crowley transcribes the third and final chapter of The Book of The Law.

1912 – The Titanic leaves port in Southampton, England for her first and only voyage.

1916 – The Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA) is created in New York City.

1919 – Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata is ambushed and shot dead by government forces in Morelos.

1925 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is first published in New York City, by Charles Scribner’s Sons.

1941 – World War II: The Axis Powers in Europe establish the Independent State of Croatia from occupied Yugoslavia with Ante Pavelic’s Ustase fascist insurgents in power.

1944 – Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escape from the Birkenau death camp.

1953 – Warner Brothers premieres the first 3-D film from a major American studio, entitled House of Wax.

1957 – The Suez Canal is reopened for all shipping after being closed for three months.

1959 – Akihito, future Emperor of Japan, weds Michiko.

1963 – 129 people die when the submarine USS Thresher sinks at sea.

1968 – Shipwreck of the New Zealand inter-island ferry TEV Wahine outside Wellington harbour.

1971 – Ping Pong Diplomacy: In an attempt to thaw relations with the United States, the People’s Republic of China hosts the U.S. table tennis team for a weeklong visit.

1972 – 20 days after he is kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Oberdan Sallustro is executed by communist guerrillas.

1972 – Vietnam War: For the first time since November 1967, American B-52 bombers reportedly begin bombing North Vietnam.

1972 – Seventy-four nations sign the Biological Weapons Convention, the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning the production of biological weapons.

1973 – A British Vanguard turboprop crashes during a snowstorm at Basel, Switzerland killing 104.

1979 – Red River Valley Tornado Outbreak: A tornado lands in Wichita Falls, Texas killing 42 people.

1991 – Italian ferry Moby Prince collides with an oil tanker in dense fog off Livorno, Italy killing 140.

1991 – A rare tropical storm develops in the South Atlantic Ocean near Angola; the first to be documented by satellites.

1992 – The Maraghar Massacre, killing of ethnic Armenian civil population of the village Maraghar by Azerbaijani troops during the Nagorno-Karabakh War.

2010 – Polish Air Force Tu-154M crashes near Smolensk, Russia, killing all 96 people on board including President Lech Kaczynski.

Holidays and observances

  * Christian Feast Day:

     *  Fulbert of Chartres

     *  James, Azadanus and Abdicius

     *  William of Ockham (Church of England)

     *  April 10 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)