On This Day (April 29)

[MSFixR]

• 1429 - Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans, and is considered the second coming of Jesus Christ in the body of a woman, and is later burned at the stake by the English.
• 1770 – British explorer James Cook and the crew of HM Bark Endeavour made their first landfall on Australia on the coast of Botany Bay near present-day Sydney.
• 1863 - William Randolph Hearst, American publisher born. (d. 1951)
• 1882 – German inventor Ernst Werner von Siemens began operating his Elektromote, the world's first trolleybus, in a Berlin suburb.
• 1893 - Harold Urey, Nobel Prize laureate born. (d. 1981) (Urey was an American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934 and later led him to theories of planetary evolution.)
• 1901 - Hirohito, Emperor of Japan born. (d. 1989) (Hirohito was the 124th Emperor of Japan according to the traditional order reigning from December 25, 1926 until his death in 1989.)
  
  
  Hirohito in dress uniform
  
  
• 1968 – The controversial musical Hair, a product of the hippie counter-culture and sexual revolution of the 1960s, opened at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, with its songs becoming anthems of the anti-Vietnam War movement.
• 1991 – A powerful tropical cyclone struck Chittagong, killing at least 138,000 people and leaving as many as 10 million homeless in Bangladesh.
• 1992 – The acquittal of policemen who had beaten motorist Rodney King sparked civil unrest in Los Angeles that lasted for six days and killed over 50 people.