Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 May 30

Burlington House, meeting place of the committee

The MAUD Committee was a British scientific working group formed during the Second World War to determine if an atomic bomb was feasible. The name came from a reference by Danish physicist Niels Bohr to his housekeeper, Maud Ray. The committee was founded in response to the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, which argued that a small sphere of pure uranium-235 could have the explosive power of thousands of tons of TNT. Its chairman was George Thomson and it met at Burlington House (pictured). Uranium enrichment, fissile materials, and the design of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons were examined. The research culminated in two reports, known collectively as the MAUD Report. In response, the British created a nuclear weapons project. The report was made available to the United States, where it energised the American effort, which eventually became the Manhattan Project; it was also handed to the Soviet Union by its atomic spies, helping start the Soviet atomic bomb project. (Full article...)

Philipp Harnoncourt in the chapel in 2017

• ... that Philipp Harnoncourt (pictured) initiated the restoration of a Gothic chapel with a triangle floorplan, originally dedicated to the Trinity and reopened on Trinity Sunday 2020?
• ... that at 100, Eric Tweedale is the oldest living Australian rugby international player?
• ... that the editor of the Pixar film Soul directed its prequel short film 22 vs. Earth?
• ... that social worker Mary Treglia died before the Mary J. Treglia Urban Renewal Project razed the neighborhood of immigrants in Sioux City, Iowa, whom she had helped?
• ... that Pop Smoke's debut album Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon was released nearly five months after his death?
• ... that a proposal was made to build a shoe factory on Waterloo Park?
• ... that Irish association footballer Margaret Saurin later worked as a coach in the US?
• ... that while the current record-holding giant pumpkin weighed 2,624.6 lb (1,190.5 kg), an ideal pumpkin could grow up to 20,000 lb (9,100 kg)?

Kamloops Indian Residential School

• A mass grave containing the remains of 215 children is found in the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (pictured) in British Columbia, Canada.
• The district court of The Hague orders Royal Dutch Shell to cut its global carbon emissions by 45 per cent by the end of 2030.
• In Mali, President Bah Ndaw, his prime minister and his defence minister are arrested by the army in a coup d'état.
• A makeshift ceremony is held to swear in Naomi Mataʻafa as Prime Minister of Samoa after she and her party are locked out of parliament.

May 30: Statehood Day in Croatia (1990); Lod Massacre Remembrance Day in Puerto Rico (1972)

Jane Seymour

• 1536 – Jane Seymour (pictured), a former lady-in-waiting, married King Henry VIII, becoming the queen consort of England.
• 1815 – The East Indiaman Arniston was wrecked during a storm at Waenhuiskrans, near Cape Agulhas in South Africa, with the loss of 372 lives.
• 1914 – RMS Aquitania, the last surviving four-funnel ocean liner, departed from Liverpool on her maiden voyage to New York City.
• 1998 – An earthquake registering 6.5 M_w struck northern Afghanistan, killing at least 4,000 people, destroying more than 30 villages, and leaving 45,000 people homeless in Takhar and Badakhshan Provinces.