A taxi driver is murdered in Bangkok by a teenager addicted to video games leading to the Thai government banning the sale of Grand Theft Auto.
2 August 2134
A Monday in history
Weekday
Monday
Season
Summer (N. Hemisphere)
Century
22nd century
Records
423
- 2008
- 2007
Raúl Iturriaga, a former deputy director of the Chilean secret police, was captured in Viña del Mar after having been on the run following a kidnapping conviction.
1986The animated film Castle in the Sky, the first from Studio Ghibli, was released.
1973A flash fire killed 50 people at a leisure centre in Douglas, Isle of Man.
1971The English rock band the Who released Who's Next, their only album to top the UK charts.
1947Star Dust, a British South American Airways airliner, crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes; its wreckage was not found until 1998.
1939Leo Szilard penned a letter, signed by Albert Einstein and addressed to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Germany may develop atomic bombs, leading to the establishment of the Manhattan Project.
1932At the California Institute of Technology, American physicist Carl David Anderson proved the existence of antimatter with the discovery of the positron, for which he would receive the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.
1923Calvin Coolidge became the 30th president of the United States after Warren G. Harding suffered a fatal heart attack.
1920Nepalese author Krishna Lal Adhikari (pictured) was sentenced to nine years in prison for publishing a book about the cultivation of corn alleged to contain attacks on the ruling dynasty.
1916An explosion, blamed on Austro-Hungarian saboteurs, sank the Italian dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci.
1914The French army's general headquarters was activated in anticipation of war with Germany.
1870One of the world's earliest underground tube railways opened in the Tower Subway (interior depicted), a tunnel beneath the River Thames in London.
1790The first United States census was officially completed, with the nation's residential population enumerated to be 3,929,214.
1100While on a hunting trip in the New Forest, King William II of England was killed by an arrow through the lung loosed by one of his own men.
461Unpopular among the Senate aristocracy for his reforming efforts, Roman emperor Majorian was deposed by Ricimer and executed five days later.
-338An allied army led by Philip II of Macedon overcame the forces of city-states led by Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony over the majority of ancient Greece.
Photo archive
24 historic images from this day — tap to open the gallery.
What was life like?
Prices, jobs, food, music and everyday routine — the world as it felt to live in.
Sources & fact check
Every claim is traced to primary sources, archives, universities and the press — with an explicit confidence rating. Dossiers are generated once and cached permanently.