Birthday Paper › What happened on …? › January 29

Events on January 29

• 1616 Dutch seafarers Jacob Le Maire and Willem Cornelisz Schouten become the first to reach the Pacific by rounding Cape Horn.
• 1781 At the Residenztheater in Munich, Mozart's opera Idomeneo is successfully premiered. The famous tenor Anton Raaff sings his last title role here. Mozart regards the opera as his best for the rest of his life.
• 1845 Edgar Allan Poe's poem The Raven is first published in the New York newspaper Evening Mirror.
• 1886 Carl Benz applies for a patent for his gas-powered vehicle.
• 1929 Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front goes on sale. Its first edition is immediately sold out through advance orders.
• 1956 At Schauspielhaus Zurich, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "tragic comedy" The Visit of the Old Lady is premiered, starring Therese Giehse in the lead role. The play subsequently becomes a worldwide success.
• 1964 The IX Olympic Winter Games are opened at Bergisel Stadium in Innsbruck by Federal President Adolf Schärf. Austrian skeleton world champion Paul Aste recites the Olympic oath.
• 1972 The nuclear power plant in Stade is connected to the grid as the eleventh German nuclear reactor.
• 1979 During a shooting spree at her school in San Diego, sixteen-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer kills two people and injures nine others. Her rationale for the act inspires Bob Geldof to write the song I Don’t Like Mondays, which becomes a major hit for his group The Boomtown Rats.
• 1994 Austrian ski racer Ulrike Maier is fatally injured in an accident during the Kandahar race in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
• 1998 Canada, Japan, Russia, the USA and the member states of the European Space Agency (ESA) conclude the treaty on the construction of the International Space Station (ISS).
• 2025 In the German Bundestag, the AfD parliamentary group helps secure a majority in a vote for the first time. It concerns a motion from the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. On this day, the event is sometimes referred to as the firewall case, and there are spontaneous demonstrations against the move, attended by several thousand people.

Born on January 29

• 1860 Anton Chekhov, Russian writer, short-story author and dramatist
• 1880 W. C. Fields, American actor
• 1892 Ernst Lubitsch, German-American film director and actor, Oscar winner
• 1913 Peter von Zahn, German radio and television journalist
• 1951 Peter Cornelius, Austrian singer
• 1960 Greg Louganis, American diver
• 1970 Heather Graham, American actress
• 1980 Nils Bomhoff, German television presenter
• 1980 Ivan Klasnić, Croatian football player
• 1981 Thomas Broich, German football player

Is your birthday on January 29?

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Source of events and birthdays: German Wikipedia article „29. Januar“, licence CC BY-SA 4.0, selected, shortened and translated by Birthday Paper.

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