January 11 is an important day in history. It’s on this day that famous US aviator, Amelia Earhart, flew solo from Hawaii to the US mainland. In 2002, the first 20 prisoners arrived at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray.
This day, January 11, also marks the birth of India’s cricket star Rahul Dravid as well as Alexander Hamilton, the first United States Secretary of the Treasury. On this day, the world also lost some famous personalities such as Israel’s former PM Ariel Sharon and New Zealand mountain climber, who was the first to summit Mount Everest.
Want to know more about what happened? Firstpost Explainers’
History Today gets you all of it and much more.
Lal Bahadur Shastri dies in an air crash
On January 11, 1966, India lost its second prime minister — Lal Bahadur Shastri — when he died in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. His demise came hours after he signed a declaration with Pakistan President Muhammad Ayub Khan post-1965 Indo-Pak war.
It is said that after signing the Tashkent accord, Shastri reached the villa offered to him by his Russian hosts. After eating, he went to bed but woke up, coughing severely. However, by the time, his doctor, Dr RN Chugh, could arrive, Shastri passed away.
Shastri’s death remains one of the biggest mysteries in India — generations have gone by but no one still knows what led to his demise, some even speculate that Russia’s spy agency, KGB, poisoned him.
These theories have further been fuelled by the central government, which started denying documents, under the RTI Act, calling them secret and its disclosure prejudicial to the interests of the country.
Insulin’s used for the first time to treat diabetes
Until 1921, people who were diagnosed with diabetes didn’t live for long — there wasn’t much doctors could do for them. At the time, the most effective treatment was to put patients on very strict diets with minimal carbohydrate intake. This gave them a few extra years but couldn’t save them. Harsh diets (some prescribed as little as 450 calories a day) sometimes even caused patients to die of starvation.
However, on January 11, 1922, a 14-year-old Leonard Thompson dying from diabetes in a Toronto hospital was injected with a solution, which came to be known as insulin, making it the first time that insulin had been administered to a diabetic patient. The concoction was thought of by Canadians Frederick Banting and Charles Best.
Within 24 hours, the teen’s dangerously high blood glucose levels dropped to near-normal levels.
A year later, Banting and Best received US patents on insulin and they sold it to the University of Toronto, with the idea that the medicine should be available to whoever needed it. The institute then gave pharmaceutical companies the licence to produce insulin without any royalties.
Today, insulin is widely used for diabetes and all we can say is thank you, diabetes researchers!
Amelia Earhart makes a flying record
On January 11, 1935, US aviator, Amelia Earhart, flew solo from Hawaii to the US mainland. Her journey took her from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California. She became the first woman to achieve this feat.
While many called this flight by Earhart a publicity stunt, the 3,875.3-km-long journey was dangerous and full of peril. In fact, 10 flyers before her had died trying to make the dangerous flight.
However, overcoming all odds, Earhart completed the journey in 18 hours 17 minutes — which was only three hours 16 minutes slower than the record set by Sir Charles A Kingsford-Smith two months ago.
Before she climbed from the plane’s cabin she stopped to powder her nose after running a comb through her tousled hair. Then she leaped nimbly to the ground, saying, “I’m sure glad to be on land again.”
Two years after her Hawaii to California flight, she attempted to fly around the world, but her plane was lost with no one knowing, even today, where she or her body lies.
This day, that year
>> In 1878, on this day, milk was delivered for the first time in glass bottles in New York City.
>> In 1964, United States Surgeon General Luther Terry released a ground-breaking government report announcing a definitive link between smoking and cancer.
>> The first 20 detainees arrive at Guantanamo Bay’s Camp X-Ray and are held outdoors in wire mesh cages on this day in 2002. They were suspected terrorists rounded up after the September 11 attacks.