Early travel luminaries like Hudson, Cook and Earhart made their marks in August, while a famous museum, subway, and canal and causeway also debuted this month.
• In 1610, English explorer Henry Hudson discovered Hudson Bay. In his ship “Discovery,” Hudson explored the eastern shore of the bay and then wintered in the extreme south of James Bay. His crew mutinied the following spring, and Hudson was set adrift in an open boat with his son and several ill crewmembers. Nothing is known of their fate.
• In 1768, James Cook left Britain to explore the Pacific for the first time. He was chosen by the Royal Society of London to visit Tahiti to observe and document the planet Venus to help scientists calculate the distance of the earth from the sun. He also had a sealed envelope with orders from the Royal Navy to be opened at the end of the scientific work. The navy wanted him to find a southern continent that mapmakers thought existed and claim it for England. He visited both Australia and New Zealand and concluded neither were this southern continent.
• In 1786, James Strange claimed Vancouver Island for Britain.
• In 1809, the first Canadian-built steamboat, “The Accommodation,” was launched on the St. Lawrence River at Montreal. Owned by the brewer and banker John Molson, it carried 10 passengers to Quebec City from Montreal on its maiden voyage, which took place at the end of October.
• In 1818, the first steamboat to ply the Great Lakes, the “Walk-in-the-Water,” left Black Rock near Buffalo for Detroit.
• In 1840, Canada’s first known balloon flight took place in Saint John, N.B.
• In 1846, the Smithsonian Institution was founded in Washington, D.C.
• In 1870, London opened the world’s first subway system.
• In 1914, the first ship passed through the Panama Canal.
• In 1919, Capt. Ernest Hoy flew from Lulu Island, BC, to Calgary, becoming the first person to fly across the Canadian Rockies.
• In 1919, the first international air service began with Air Transport and Travel’s flight from London to Paris. Only one passenger made the trip on a converted biplane bomber. The trip took two-and-a-half hours and cost 21 pounds.
• In 1927, the International Peace Bridge between Fort Erie, Ont., and Buffalo, NY, was dedicated.
• In 1929, the German dirigible “Graf Zeppelin” began a round-the-world flight, which was completed Sept. 4.
• In 1930, the British airship “R100” crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Montreal. The trip was financed by Britain and Canada, part of a plan to provide airship service throughout the Commonwealth. The flight took 78 hours and 52 minutes. But airships were too vulnerable to the elements, and after the explosion of the Hindenburg in 1937, airship travel ceased.
• In 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to make a non-stop flight across the United States, flying from Los Angeles to Newark, NJ, in 19 hours and five minutes.
• In 1939, the world’s first jet-propelled plane, the Heinkel He 178, made its first flight in Marienehe, in northern Germany.
• In 1949, the first commercial jet plane to fly in the Western Hemisphere made its maiden flight over the Malton airport (now Pearson International) outside Toronto. The Jetliner C-102 was designed in Canada by an Englishman, James Floyd, and built by Avro of Toronto. It was never produced commercially.
• In 1955, the Canso Causeway, linking Cape Breton Island to the Nova Scotia mainland, was opened. Built at an estimated cost of $22 million, the causeway took three years to complete.
• In 1961, the city of Berlin was divided by a concrete wall as East Germany sealed off the border between the Eastern and Western sectors in a move to control emigration to the West. The wall snaked 166 km around the enclave of West Berlin and was backed by floodlights, barbed wire, trip wires, minefields and scattered guns. On Nov. 9, 1989, East German authorities unexpectedly opened the borders. The wall was then dismantled and the two Germanys were unified.
• In 1978, the first successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight ended as Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman landed their “Double Eagle II” outside Paris.
• In 1980, the United States began placing armed marshals aboard some flights in a bid to stop hijackings to Cuba by homesick refugees. Six US flights had been diverted the week earlier to Cuba.
• In 1981, transatlantic air traffic was thrown into confusion when some Canadian air traffic controllers refused to handle flights to and from the United States. The controllers claimed a strike by US air traffic controllers had made the skies unsafe. Normal operations resumed two days later.
• In 1982, the luxury liner “Queen Elizabeth 2” left Southampton on its first cruise since returning from transporting British troops in the Falkland Islands conflict.
• In 1989, an Australian commercial airliner became the first to fly non-stop from London to Sydney.
• In 1991, a replica of an ancient Viking ship arrived from Norway at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland to commemorate a Viking landing in the area 1,000 years earlier.
• In 1992, the luxury liner Queen Elizabeth 2 ran aground off southeastern Massachusetts.
• In 1993, the federal government turned over control of Pearson International Airport near Toronto to the private sector.
• In 1993, Buckingham Palace in London was opened to the public for limited tours. The money raised from the $12 admission and souvenirs was earmarked for repairing Windsor Castle, which had been damaged by fire the previous November.
• In 1994, Jordan and Israel opened their first border crossing after 46 years of hostilities.
• In 1996, Lunenburg, NS, was designated a world heritage site.
• In 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded shortly after leaving New York City for Paris, killing all 230 people on board.
• In 1999, Onex Corp. chief executive Gerald Schwartz announced a $5.7-billion plan to buy Air Canada and its rival Canadian Airlines and merge them into a giant new Air Canada. The offer was killed by opposition from Air Canada, which later took over Canadian.
• In 2001, an Air Transat Airbus 330, on a Toronto-Lisbon flight, made a safe emergency landing on Terceira Island in the Azores after it ran out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean because of a leak. Pilot Robert Piche, who glided the plane skillfully for 18 minutes over the ocean, was hailed as hero.
• In 2003, temperatures hit a record 37.7 C in London for the first time in recorded history. Throughout Europe, the summer of 2003 broke heat records, with some parts seeing temperatures soaring six degrees above normal. The weather was estimated to have caused the deaths of tens of thousands.
• In 2005, an Air France passenger jet carrying 309 people skidded off the runway in a fierce thunderstorm at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. All on board escaped before the jet burst into flames.
• In 2006, British authorities thwarted a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up several aircraft heading to the United States using explosives smuggled in hand luggage. Twenty-four men were arrested in Britain. The arrests led to tough new restrictions on bringing liquids on flights.
• In 2009, the Canada Line, Vancouver’s new rapid transit line and the first to link a major Canadian city to its airport, opened with a day of free riding.
• In 2010, the World Health Organization declared the swine flu pandemic officially over. The WHO said at least 18,449 people had died worldwide since the outbreak began in April 2009.
• In 2018, an Air Canada-led consortium reached a $450-million deal to acquire the Aeroplan loyalty program from Aimia Inc. The group, which included TD Bank, CIBC, and Visa Canada, also agreed to assume the approximately $1.9-billion liability associated with Aeroplan miles customers had accumulated.