March 18: This Day That Year

March 18

- 1745 - Robert Walpole (1st British PM, 1721-42) dies at 68 (born Aug 26 1676).

- 1754 - Thomas Pelham-Holles becomes British PM after death of his brother Henry Pelham.

- 1793 - Germany: Mainz declared first republican state (Republic of Mainz) by Andreas Joseph Hofmann.

- 1847 - 1st Dutch public telegram.

- 1879 - Cluny MacPherson inventor of the gas mask, born in John's, Canada.

- 1922 - India: British magistrates sentence Mahatma Gandhi to 6 years imprisonment due to disobedience.

- 1932 - Birthday: F. W. de Klerk, South African President (1989-94), 1993 Nobel Peace Price laureate.

- 1940 - Benito Mussolini (Italian Dictator) teams up with Adolf Hitler in war against France & Britain.

- 1945 - 1,250 US bombers attack on Berlin.

- 1965 - Rolling Stones fined for public urination £5.

- 1965 - Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov becomes first person walk in space by leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes.

- 1989 - Egypt: A 4,400-year-old mummy found in the Pyramid of Cheops.

- 1990 - USA: 13 works of Art worth over $500 million are stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (Largest art robbery in US history).

- 2003 - British Sign Language gets recognized as an official British language.

- 2014 - US closes the Syrian embassy in Washington.