In 1993 Actor and professional wrestler Andre the Giant (André René Roussimoff) died of a heart attack in a French hotel aged 46. The French born star suffered from gigantism which is what caused his large structure that gave him his name.

In 1970 John Lennon writes the single ‘Instant Karma’. He wrote it in the morning and recorded it in the afternoon on this day in 1970.

In 1967 Apollo 1 tragedy takes the lives of three American astronauts. Gus Grissom, Ed White (the first American to spacewalk) and Roger Chaffee were rehearsing for their planned flight to the moon at Cape Kennedy when a spark is believed to of ignited an oxygen rich atmosphere causing a fireball within the capsule.

In 1951 The United States begin testing nuclear weapons in the Nevada Desert.

In 1945 the Russian army discover the Nazi’s largest concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. When initially discovered by the Russian army they had no idea the scale of atrocities that had taken place there. Based on testimony from the 3,000 survivors of the camp it was estimated that about 4,000,000 people of different nationalities died at this camp alone.

In 1944 the siege of Leningrad was finally over after 872 days (known as the 900 day siege). When the Germans were unable to take Leningrad, the second largest city in the USSR (United Soviet States of Russia), Hitler ordered his troops to lay siege to the city. With no supplies in or out of Leningrad, Hitler hoped to starve the Russian people in the city. A small puncture of the German line was made a year before allowing small amounts of supplies to flow into the city but it was not until this day in 1945 that the siege was over and the Russian people of Leningrad were free. Accounts of the death toll vary from just under 1 million to 1.5 million people with just over half being civilians.

In 1888 Thomas Edison, the American inventor, received the patent confirmation for his electric lamp, (Pat No.223,898).