From Marco Polo to Mona Lisa travels, and a new name in 1965 for Trans-Canada Airlines (you’ll never guess it!), January boasts some interesting historical travel tidbits.
In 1324, explorer Marco Polo died at age 70.
In 1759, the British Museum opened in London. Today the museum, which is free to visitors, houses more than seven million objects representing many cultures.
In 1773, the first public museum in America was organized, in Charleston, S.C.
In 1773, Capt. James Cook’s ship, “Resolution,” was the first ship to cross the Antarctic Circle.
In 1778, Capt. Cook reached the Hawaiian Islands, which he dubbed the “Sandwich Islands.”
In 1785, Jean-Pierre Blanchard made the first balloon crossing of the English Channel.
In 1793, Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard, using a hot-air balloon, flew between Philadelphia and Woodbury, N.J.
In 1830, the United States’ first commercial railroad service, B&O Railway Company put a horse-drawn carriage onto a steel track.
In 1840, American explorer Capt. Charles Wilkes discovered Antarctica.
In 1850, explorers Robert McClure and Richard Collinson began the extensive search for the Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin and his expedition. It has been described as the greatest search mission in the history of exploration. While looking for Franklin, the expedition discovered the Northwest Passage. It is likely that Franklin found it first, but none of his crew lived to report the discovery.
In 1863, the London Underground, the oldest subway system in the world, opened. The first trains – using steam locomotives that burned coke and later coal – began running from Paddington to Farringdon in the City of London, totalling seven stops over 6.4 km.
In 1869, the first suspension bridge over the Niagara Gorge was opened to traffic at Queenston, Ont.
In 1871, Andrew S. Hallidie received a patent for a cable-car system that began service in San Francisco in 1873.
In 1892, the Ellis Island Immigrant Station in New York formally opened.
In 1885, a US patent was issued for the roller coaster.
In 1903, the boundary between Alaska and Canada was settled by an international commission. The decision, largely in favour of American interests, enraged the Canadian public.
In 1908, the Grand Canyon National Monument was created with a proclamation by US President Theodore Roosevelt. (It became a national park in 1919.)
In 1912, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole. Delayed by sickness and bad weather, he and four companions arrived to learn they’d been beaten to the Pole by a month by Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Scott and his men died on the return journey.
In 1914, the first steamship passed through the Panama Canal.
In 1915, the Canadian Northern Railway between Quebec and Vancouver was completed at Basque, B.C.
In 1920, the New York Times ridiculed aviation pioneer Robert Goddard for saying that rockets would work in outer space. The paper issued an apology and retraction after the 1969 “Apollo 11” Moon landing.
In 1924, the first Winter Olympics began in Chamonix, France. (Hockey and figure skating competitions had been staged in conjunction with previous Summer Olympics.)
In 1937, millionaire Howard Hughes set a transcontinental air record when he flew from Los Angeles to Newark, N.J., in seven hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.
In 1949, the first non-stop trans-Canada flight, from Vancouver to Halifax, was completed.
In 1951, the world’s first jet passenger trip took place as an Avro jetliner flew from Chicago to New York in 102 minutes.
In 1951, Albert Guay of Quebec City was hanged in Montreal for murder. Guay planted a time bomb aboard a Canadian Pacific Airways plane that killed 23 people, including his wife. Two accomplices were also eventually hanged.
In 1953, the “Empress of Canada,” a luxury liner of the Canadian Pacific fleet, was destroyed in a dockside fire at Liverpool, England. The ship sailed between Canada and Britain for years and was used as a troop ship during the Second World War.
In 1955, Canada and Japan signed an agreement on trans-Pacific air routes.
In 1956, the first jet flight was made across Canada from Vancouver to Dartmouth, NS.
In 1958, New Zealand explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, 38, who conquered Mount Everest in 1953, reached the South Pole by an overland route – the first man to do so since Capt. Robert Scott reached the pole in 1912.
In 1959, American Airlines began jet flights between New York and Los Angeles on the Boeing 707.
In 1963, US President John F. Kennedy officiated at the unveiling of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It was the first time France had lent the painting to another country.
In 1964, Pope Paul VI began a visit to the Holy Land – becoming the first pontiff to travel by airplane.
In 1965, the name change of Trans-Canada Airlines to Air Canada took effect.
In 1967, the Confederation train, a mobile museum of Canadian history, left Victoria, B.C. after being officially unveiled by Secretary of State Judy LaMarsh. The train made 83 stops across Canada until Dec. 4.
In 1969, the Concorde supersonic jet was flown for the first time at Bristol, England.
In 1969, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet made its first trans-Atlantic flight to London from New York.
In 1972, the former passenger liner “Queen Elizabeth” was destroyed by fire in Hong Kong Harbour.
In 1972, Canadian air traffic controllers went on strike, grounding most commercial flights. The walkout lasted 10 days.
In 1973, US airlines began scanning passengers with electronic devices, a practice now routine at major airports.
In 1976, the supersonic Concorde jet was put into service by Britain and France, with flights from London to Bahrain and from Paris to Rio de Janeiro. (The Concorde airliner was retired in 2003.)
In 1980, the Israeli-Egyptian border was opened for the first time since 1948.
In 1982, an Air Florida 737 crashed into Washington, D.C.’s 14th Street Bridge after takeoff during a snowstorm and fell into the Potomac River, killing a total of 78 people, four of them on the bridge.
In 1986, Canadian Gareth Wood was one of three explorers to reach the South Pole on foot. The group was retracing the route followed by Robert Scott in 1912.
In 1986, Britain and France announced plans to build a tunnel under the English Channel. (The “Chunnel” was opened on May 6, 1994. Regular passenger service began six months later.)
In 1986, NASA’s space shuttle “Challenger” lifted off with catastrophic results. It broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing seven crew members.
In 1988, residents of Prince Edward Island voted 59.4 percent in favour of a bridge or tunnel connecting them to the mainland. The Confederation Bridge opened on May 31, 1997.
In 1989, Canadian Airlines International announced it was purchasing Wardair, Canada’s third largest carrier, for about $248 million.
In 1990, for safety reasons, Italy’s famous Leaning Tower of Pisa was closed to the public for the first time since it opened around 1275. It re-opened Dec. 15, 2001 after being stabilized in an effort that cost an estimated $40 million.
In 1990, “The Canadian,” Via Rail’s legendary passenger train, made its final trip across Canada after 34 years of service on the world’s longest rail line, a 4,645-km route.
In 1991, British tycoon Richard Branson and fellow adventurer Per Lindstrand completed the first crossing of the Pacific in a hot-air balloon. They landed in a blinding snowstorm in the Northwest Territories. When asked what inspired him to try the feat, Branson replied, “Pure stupidity.”
In 1992, Dr. Roberta Bondar became Canada’s first woman in space when she and six other astronauts blasted off aboard the shuttle “Discovery.” The cargo included slime mould, mouse embryos, and wheat and oat seeds as specimens for scientific experiments. The eight-day mission was a success and the Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.-born neurologist raved about the view from space.
In 1993, Czechoslovakia was peacefully split into two new countries – the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In 1993, the European Community’s single market came into force.
In 2001, Canada 3000 announced it would buy and merge with rival Royal Aviation in an all-stock deal worth $82 million. The merged carrier, to be called Canada 3000 Airlines, was to continue specializing in low-fare domestic and international routes, but financial problems caused Canada’s second-largest airline to suspend operations in November.
In 2002, 12 European countries dropped their national currencies and adopted the euro.
In 2002, in intra-day trading, the Canadian dollar fell below 62 cents US for the first time ever. It rebounded to close at 62.12 cents US. (The next day, the loonie closed at a record low 62.02 cents US).
In 2003, CN Rail, Canada’s largest railway, announced it was buying B.C. Rail, the third-largest railway, in a $1 billion cash deal.
In 2004, the United States began fingerprinting foreign visitors as part of a heightened anti-terrorist campaign.
In 2004, NASA’s “Opportunity” rover zipped its first pictures of Mars, showing a surface smooth and dark red in some places, and strewn with fragmented slabs of light bedrock in others.
In 2009, three Canadians set a world record for the fastest journey across Antarctica to the South Pole. Ray Zahab, Kevin Valley and Richard Weber arrived at the South Pole after trekking 1,130 km on skis, snowshoes and on foot through the frozen continent. It took the men 33 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes to complete the journey from Hercules Inlet on the Ronne Ice Shelf to the pole.
In 2009, a US Airways jetliner crash landed in the Hudson River after colliding with a flock of geese minutes after taking off from New York City’s La Guardia airport. All 155 people on board survived in what was dubbed “The Miracle on the Hudson” – and pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was hailed as a hero.
In 2011, Inderjit Singh Reyat, the only man ever convicted in the 1985 Air India bombings that killed 331 people, was sentenced to nine years in prison for perjury at the 2003 trial of two men acquitted in the attacks. (In 2017, the Parole Board of Canada allowed him to leave a halfway house where he was required to stay following his release from prison in 2016.)
In 2012, cruise ship Costa Concordia slammed into a reef off the coast of the tiny Italian island of Giglio after Capt. Francesco Schettino made an unauthorized diversion. More than 4,000 people were forced to evacuate and 32 were killed as the vessel listed and ended up half-submerged. Schettino was convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison for manslaughter, causing the shipwreck and abandoning ship while many of the passengers and crew were still aboard.
In 2017, Australia, China and Malaysia announced they were suspending the nearly three-year underwater search of the Indian Ocean for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014 with 239 onboard, including two Canadians.
In 2018, a cellphone and TV alert sent by a Hawaii emergency official that warned of a ballistic missile headed for the state sent the islands into a panic. It took security officials 38 minutes to correct the error. (The worker was reassigned.)
In 2020, Australia launched one of the largest evacuations in its history, as more than 200 wildfires burned across the country. The Victoria state government ordered as many as 140,000 permanent residents and tens of thousands more vacationers to leave the region before fires closed roads and trapped them.
In 2020, at least 57 Canadians and dozens more who were on their way to Canadian destinations were among the 176 people killed when a Ukrainian passenger plane on route to Kyiv crashed minutes after takeoff from Tehran’s main airport. Iran later admitted to shooting down the plane by mistake.
In 2020, six major airports in Canada and the US took precautionary measures involving travellers from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, telling them to inform a border service officer if they were experiencing flu-like symptoms.