On this day - Lt Gen Raj Kadyan

If people make fun of us, it probably means we're doing something right.

On this day, 10 Nov....

1698 - East India Company purchased Calcutta, which was not more than a village at that time.

1793 - France ends forced worship of God. (In 18th-century France, 95% of the population were adherents of the Catholic Church. During the revolution, France underwent dechristianisation. New policies of the Revolutionary authorities included: confiscation of Church lands (1790) used as backing for the new assignat currency; destruction of statues, plates and other iconography from places of worship; destruction of crosses, bells and other external signs of worship; the institution of revolutionary and civic cults, including the Cult of Reasonand subsequently the Cult of the Supreme Being (spring 1794); and the enactment of a law on October 21, 1793 making all nonjuring priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight).

1885 - Gottlieb Daimler's unveils the world's first motorcycle. (In the first significant run, Daimler's 17-year-old son, Paul, travelled from Cannstatt to Unterturkheim and back. Their “Reitwagen” had a wooden frame and wheels. A leather drive belt ran between the engine and large brass gears on the rear wheel. With no suspension on the wheels, the leather saddle gave a very uncomfortable ride, at a speed up to 12 km/hr. This was built as an experimental vehicle to test the new Daimler engine in a proof of concept, which was to power Daimler's first motorised carriage the following year).

1891 - Granville T Woods patents electric railway. (The first known electric locomotive was built in 1837 by chemist Robert Davidson of Aberdeen. He later built a larger locomotive named Galvani, exhibited at the Royal Scottish Society of Arts Exhibition in 1841 but the limited power from batteries prevented its general use. It was destroyed by railway workers, who saw it as a threat to their security of employment. The first electric passenger train was presented by Werner von Siemens at Berlin in 1879.  The world's first electric tram line opened in Lichterfelde near Berlin, Germany, in 1881. In the U.S. electric trolleys were pioneered in 1888 on the Richmond Union Passenger Railway. The first electrically-worked underground line was the City and South London Railway; it opened in 1890).

1901 - Formal inauguration of the new North-West Frontier Province created out of the Punjab.

1951 - First long distance telephone call without operator assistance. ( Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey called his counterpart in Alameda, California. Three digits were added to the number dialled).

1970 - The Great Wall of China opened for tourism.

1983 - U.S. student Fred Cohen presented to a security seminar the results of his test - the first documented virus, created as an experiment in computer security. Cohen created this first virus when studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California. Others had written about the potential for creating pernicious programmes but he was the first to demonstrate a working example.

1989 - Germans begin demolishing Berlin Wall. {The Berlin Wall  was a barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. Constructed by the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), starting on 13 August 1961, the wall completely cut off (by land)West Berlin from surrounding East Germany and from East Berlin until it was opened in November 1989.] Its demolition officially began on 13 June 1990 and was completed in 1992}.

Born....

1848 - Surendranath Banerji, popularly known as Rashtraguru. (He was President of the Indian National Congress twice, in 1895 at Pune and in 1902 at Ahmedabad).

Good morning. Have a nice day.
Lt Gen Raj Kadyan