21 april

About to be exiled from Baghdad, the Bábí leader spent twelve days in a garden by the Tigris and told his companions he was the one the Báb had foretold. Baháʼís keep the twelve days of Riḍván as their chief festival.

He died at Stormfield, his house in Redding, Connecticut, the day after the comet’s perihelion.

Manfred von Richthofen, credited with 80 victories, was killed by a single bullet while chasing a Camel low over the Somme. The Canadian pilot Roy Brown was credited at the time; Australian machine-gunners on the ground most likely fired the shot.

De Gaulle’s provisional government, still in Algiers, decreed that women “are voters and eligible on the same terms as men”. The Chamber of Deputies had passed women’s suffrage six times between the wars, and the Senate had blocked it each time. Women first voted in April 1945.

A crowd of about 100,000 surged onto the runway at Palisadoes, and the emperor waited in his plane until the Rastafari elder Mortimo Planno calmed them. Rastafari keep the day as Grounation Day.

The South Vietnamese 18th Division, under General Lê Minh Đảo, held the crossroads town 60 kilometres from Saigon for twelve days against several divisions. It was the last great stand of the Republic’s army; the North went around it.

In a long televised speech at the palace, Thiệu handed power to his vice president and blamed the United States for abandoning its ally. Days later he flew to Taiwan. On 28 April the general Dương Văn Minh became president, to negotiate an end.

Gunpei Yokoi’s handheld had a small green-tinted screen and ran for about 30 hours on four AA batteries, which beat colour rivals that drained theirs in a few. In North America, from that July, it came with Tetris in the box, after Henk Rogers flew to Moscow and won the handheld rights from the…

On the Yamanashi test track, JR Central’s L0 series train, lifted and driven by magnets, held 603 kilometres an hour for about eleven seconds, a record for any train. The same technology is being built for the Chūō Shinkansen from Tokyo to Nagoya.