ON THIS DAY JULY 2

1505 After being caught in a violent thunderstorm, Martin Luther, a seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation, declares that he will become a monk.

1698 Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine.

1839 Twenty nautical miles off Cuba, 53 kidnapped Africans, led by Joseph Cinqué, mutiny and take over the slave ship Amistad. 1901 Outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid rob a train of $40 000 at Wagner, Montana. 1934 Night of the Long Knives in Germany ends with the death of Ernst Röhm.

1937 Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan are last heard from over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first equatorial round-the-world flight.

1960 Defending women’s champion Maria Bueno of Brazil beats South Africa’s Sandra Reynolds 8-6, 6-0 at Wimbledon.

1961 Nobel Prize-winning author, adventurer, war correspondent, bullfighter, drinker and all-round macho man, Ernest Hemingway commits suicide at his home in Idaho, shooting himself with a shotgun. His father, grandfather, brother, sister and granddaughter all killed themselves. He is best known for classics such as The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Old Man and The Sea.

1962 The first Walmart store opens in Rogers, Arkansas. The global firm, through its subsidiary Massmart, owns Game, Makro, Builder’s Warehouse and CBW in South Africa. 1990 About 1 400 Muslim pilgrims die in a stampede in a tunnel at Mecca.

2002 Steve Fossett becomes the first to fly solo around the world non-stop in a balloon. 2005 The Live 8 benefit concerts – organised by Bob Geldof to raise awareness of poverty – take place in the G8 states and SA.

2010 The South Kivu tank truck explosion in the Democratic Republic of the Congo kills at least 230 people.

2016 A suicide bombing of Karrada in Baghdad kills at least 341 people.

2018 British divers discover 12 boys and their football coach alive in Tham Luang Nang Non cave, Thailand, where they had been trapped for nine days by monsoon flooding. | THE HISTORIAN