Major Anniversaries in 2024
425 years since the birth of English politician Oliver Cromwell who governed the British Isles as Lord Protector during the English Republic period from 1653 to 1658
350 years since the birth of Jethro Tull, an English agricultural pioneer who perfected the horse-drawn seed drill and the horse-drawn hoe, which provide the basis for modern agriculture
350 years since the Treaty of Westminster was ratified finally ceding Manhattan and New York city to Britain
250 years since Jesse Ramsden's invention of the cast iron boring machine, perhaps the first machine tool, which enabled major advances in munitions and steam engine cylinders
225 years since Richard Trevithick built his first high-pressure engine at Dolcoath tin mine in Cornwall
225 years since the rediscovery of the Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian port of Rosetta by French solider Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard
200 years since the birth of William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, a Scots-Irish scientist and engineer, best known for his work on thermodynamics, the marine compass and for laying the first undersea trans-Atlantic cable
200 years since the death of Joseph Aspidin, an English inventor who patented a process for producing 'Portland cement'; also father of William Aspidin who refined the process to create modern Portland cement
200 years since French physicist Nicolas Carnot described the Carnot Cycle, the basis of modern thermodynamics
200 years since the foundation of the RNLI, the largest lifeboat service in the British Isles and the oldest lifeboat service in the world