On this day in history, October 5

Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.

1789 Parisian women march to the royal palace at Versailles to demand bread, and to have the king and his court moved to Paris.

1793 Christianity is disestablished in France.

1864 Most of Calcutta (Kolkata) is destroyed by a cyclone, which kills 60 000 people.

1869 A strong hurricane, known as the Saxby Gale, devastates the Bay of Fundy, in Canada. British naval officer Stephen Saxby, using astronomy, predicted it 10 months earlier.

1886 ZAR official Johann Rissik sends a plan for the surveying of a new town to surveyor JE de Villiers, suggesting that the town’s name should be Johannesburg.

1910 Portugal overthrows its monarchy, and becomes a republic.

1914 An aircraft successfully destroys another aircraft with gunfire for the first time.

1945 Hollywood Black Friday: A strike by film set decorators turns into a bloody riot at the gates of Warner Brothers’ studios.

1960 The government holds a referendum for white voters to decide if South Africa should remain a member of the Commonwealth or become a republic. The voting age is lowered to 18 years and includes white voters in South West Africa (now Namibia). Two former Boer republics, Transvaal and Orange Free State (now Free State), and South West Africa, vote in favour, while the Cape province, though also in favour, has a smaller majority. Natal (KwaZulu-Natal), which has more English-speaking whites than Afrikaners, voted against.

1965 A train accident at Effingham, Natal, claims the lives of 88 people.

1974 The Guildford pub bombing by the IRA kills 5 people and injures 65.

1982 An unmanned rocket sled streaks to 9 851km/h at White Sands, New Mexico.

1983 The leaders of six black homelands reject the tricameral constitution and are backed by black business and church leaders.

2000 Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević resigns over the Bulldozer Revolution.

2014 French driver Jules Bianchi collides with a recovery vehicle during the Japanese Grand Prix. He dies 2 days later and is the first F1 death in 21 years (the last driver to die before that was Ayrton Senna in 1994).

2020 At least 14 million tons of plastic pieces are at the bottom of the ocean, 30 times more than on the surface, according to new research.