What happened this week in history

1837 - London’s first railway station, Euston, opened.

1872 - Mahlon Loomis received a patent for the wireless.

1885 - Professional football was legalised in Britain, although a number of clubs admitted they had already been paying their players.

1940 - The government decreed the sale of new cars should cease for the remainder of the war.

1941 - The ‘V for Victory’ campaign was launched in Britain.

1944 - German staff officer Colonel von Stauffenburg attempted to assassinate Hitler in Rastenburg.

1951 - King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem.

1954 - Elvis Presley gave his first public performance on a truck outside a chemist in Memphis.

1960 - Sirimavo Bandaranaike, widow of Ceylon’s assassinated prime minister Solomon Bandaranaike, became the world’s first woman prime minister.

1960 - The Polaris missile was successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time.

1962 - The world’s first passenger hovercraft service started across the estuary of the River Dee.

1964 - Nasa tested its first successful rocket engine.

1968 - In a radio interview, actress Jane Asher announced her engagement to Paul McCartney was off. She had neglected to tell him first.

1969 - American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin landed on the Moon.

1976 - The first close-ups of Mars were sent back to Earth from the American Viking Spacecraft.

1982 - Eight soldiers on ceremonial duty in London’s Hyde Park and St James’ Park were killed by two IRA bomb blasts. Seven horses also died.

1999 - A woman took command of a Nasa space shuttle for the first time. Eileen Collins led a five-person crew on the shuttle Columbia.