A look back at events on May 7 with Mike Badham

1832: Greece became an independent kingdom with Otto of Bavaria as king, although he was depoosed in 1862. The Greeks had thrown off Turkish rule in an 1821 rebellion and the 1827 naval battle of Navarino where they were helped by Britain, France and Russia.

1892: Conan Doyle wrote to Dr Joseph Bell, his old university lecturer, and told him he'd based the character of Sherlock Holmes on him. They say Bell could look at the way a man walked, assess his clothing, look at his hands - and tell you his trade and recent history.

1895: Mass killer Herman Mudgett was executed in the United States. He murdered nearly 200 women - and blamed his demise on them!

1896: Scott Jackson left a suitcase for safe keeping with a bartender in Louisville, Kentucky. The man joked at the time that it felt as if it contained a bowling ball, but remembered the incident later when the headless body of Pearl Bryan was found in a shallow grave. A post mortem revealed that Pearl had been drugged, but recovered consciousness just as her head was being cut off. Her boyfriend Scott Jackson soon confessed to the crime and implicated dental student Alonzo Walling, who had previously been so indiscreet as to tell an acquaintance that he needed a human skull to study. 1901: Frank Cooper was born in Montana, USA. After a short spell at school in England, he became a cartoonist. Leter he went to Hollywood and became a stunt extra, specialising in falling off horses at $5 a time. Later he changed his name to Gary and became a top film star, renowned for romancing his leading ladies.

1915: The Lusitania was torpedoed by a German U-boat and sank in 15 minutes with the loss of 1,200 lives only ten miles from the Irish coast. The disastrous loss of civilian life helped to bring America into the war against Germany. But 50 years later it was revealed she had also been carrying munitions to Britain.

1917: Captain Albert Ball was killed after shooting down 44 enemy planes. The young pilot from Nottingham was in the habit of marching round his tent playing the violin. On his last flight, he vanished into cloud and later his body was found in the wreckage of his crashed plane. There were no bullet wounds, only the injuries from the crash.

1928: The voting age for British women was reduced from 30 to 21.

1936: The first-ever Catholic Mass in an airship was celebrated by Fr John Schulte, in the zeppelin Hindenburg over the Atlantic. The next year, on May 6 1937 the airship exploded as it moored at Lakehurst, New Jersey , killing 36 - and provided one of the most famous newsreel shots ever. At that moment the Graf Zeppelin was on its way back from South America to Germany. Its passengers became the last fare-paying airship passengers. In 1940, both the remaining zeppelins were scrapped.

1941: The Allies captured a German weather ship and gained new information from her codebooks about the Enigma code machine.

1954: In Vietnam, the French stronghold at Dien Bien Phu fell to the communist Viet Cong. Later they went on to beat the Americans, too.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.