MOMENTS IN TIME

Jan 16, 20130

The History Channel

• On Jan. 31, 1606, in London, Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the plot to blow up the British Parliament building, jumps to his death moments before his execution for treason. He had been found lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building with 2 tons of gunpowder.

• On Feb. 1, 1884, the first portion of the Oxford English Dictionary is published. In 1857, members of London’s Philological Society decided to produce a dictionary that would cover all vocabulary from 1150 A.D. to the present. It took more than 40 years to complete.

• On Jan. 28, 1915, the captain of a German cruiser orders the destruction of the William P. Frye, an American merchant ship off the Brazilian coast. He had ordered the Frye to jettison its cargo as contraband, but the ship’s crew refused. It was the first American merchant vessel lost to Germany’s aggression during World War I.

• On Jan. 29, 1922, in the middle of a film, the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington, D.C., collapses, killing 108 people and sending another 133 to the hospital. Accumulated snowfall from a blizzard collapsed the theater’s roof, which fell down on top of theatergoers.

• On Jan. 30, 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg names Adolf Hitler — fuhrer (leader) of the National Socialist German Workers Party (or Nazi Party) — as chancellor of Germany. Hitler’s meteoric rise to prominence in Germany was spurred largely by the German people’s frustration with dismal economic conditions.

• On Feb. 3, 1950, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born British scientist who helped develop the atomic bomb, is arrested in Great Britain for passing top-secret information about the bomb to the Soviet Union. The arrest of Fuchs led authorities to several other individuals, including Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in the U.S.

• On Feb. 2, 1991, Hurley Haywood begins his quest for his fifth win at the 24 Hours of Daytona. In 2008, Haywood retired from full-time racing with more endurance victories (10) than any other driver.