ON THIS DAY MAY 18

1774 Joachim van Plettenberg, for whom the town and bay is named, is sworn in as the governor of the Cape.

1804 Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor of France, snatching the crown from the hands of Pope Pius VII during the coronation ceremony and then crowning himself.

1830 The lawn mower is invented.

1912 India’s first film, Shree Pundalik, is released in Bombay (Mumbai).

1934 The Academy Award statuette is first called an Oscar by a gossip columnist.

1944 The bloody Battle for Rome is won when Polish troops scale the heights of Monte Casino. It involved many South Africans.

(The Benedictine monastery, said to have been the world’s most glorious, was obliterated by bombers three months earlier because an officer mistook the German word for abbot to mean battalion. A senior officer later saw the error, but it was too late, the planes were in the air. It has been called the greatest single aesthetic disaster of World War II.)

1948 Saudi Arabia joins the Arab invasion of the newly formed state of Israel.

1953 American pilot Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman to break the sound barrier. 1969 Apollo 10 – a dress-rehearsal for a moon landing two months later – is launched. It gets to within 16km of the moon.

1980 Mount St Helens, in the US state of Washington, erupts dramatically, causing the largest landslide in history, killing 57 people, 7 000 large animals and costing $1 billion. It spews 520 million tons of ash across the US and from a distance people thought an atomic bomb had gone off because of the mushroom cloud that formed. Enough trees were levelled by the blast to have built 300 000 houses. | THE HISTORIAN