Happy Anniversary: Page Three girls make their mark

WHO would have thought that ninety years to the day after the first women graduated from a British university, the Sun would publish its first Page Three girls? And those are only two of the neglected anniversaries in the coming week.

15 November:

1837: Isaac Pitman publishes his shorthand under the snappy title 'Stenographic Sound-Hand'.

1889: King Pedro II abdicates and Brazil becomes a republic.

1901: The first electric hearing- aid is patented by Miller Reese in New York; it has the practical disadvantage of not being portable.

1969: The first colour television commercial is transmitted, advertising Bird's Eye frozen peas.

16 November:

1907: Oklahoma becomes the 4th State of the Union.

1959: First Broadway performance of The Sound of Music.

17 November:

Feast Day of St Gregory the Wonderworker, bishop of neo- Caeseria, whose alleged miracles include drying up a swamp, diverting a river and moving a mountain. 1880: London University gives degrees to Britain's first women graduates.

1913: Steamship Louise become the first vessel through the Panama Canal.

1922: J Walton-Newbold becomes Britain's first Communist MP.

1944: A duck alerted the citizens of Freiburg, Germany to an imminent air raid. A statue was later erected in its honour.

1955: Anglesey become Britain's first local authority to introduce fluoride into the water.

1970: The Sun publishes its first Page Three girl photograph, appropriately enough on the feast day of St Hilda, patron saint of business women.

18 November:

1477: Caxton published The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, the first dated book to be printed in England.

1928: First appearance of Mickey Mouse in the cartoon Steamboat Willie, though he had appeared in an earlier cartoon under the name Mortimer Mouse.

19 November:

1893: First newspaper colour supplement appears, four pages long, in the New York World.

1951: The white football becomes officially acceptable, especially at Highbury, where it blends in with the Arsenal players' shorts.

1959: Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, says adultery should be made a criminal offence.

1969: Pele scores his 1000th goal.

20 November:

1906: Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce join forces and names to form their new company.

1970: The ten-shilling note goes out of circulation.

1979: Anthony Blunt is stripped of his knighthood.

21 November:

1783: Jean de Rosier and the Marquis d'Arlandes make the first unassisted flight in a hot-air balloon for 25 minutes above Paris.