Today in history—April 6

1199: Richard the Lion-Heart dies of an arrow wound at Châlus, France, where his bowels are still preserved in a chapel. He pardons the man who shot him, but after Richard’s death the man is flayed alive.  Slowly.

1652: The Dutch East India Company establishes a supply depot at a fine harbor near the Cape of Good Hope. The place will later grow and be known as Kaapstad, or “Cape Town.”

1808: John Jacob Astor incorporates his American Fur Company.

1869: John Wesley Hyatt receives a patent for the first plastic, which he calls “Celluloid,” a registered trademark of his Celluloid Manufacturing Co. of Newark, New Jersey.

1886: The city of Vancouver, British Columbia, is incorporated. The place had hitherto been known as Gastown, but it is renamed by the Canadian Pacific Railway, which thinks the new name will bring more traffic.

1890: Aviation pioneer Anton Herman Gerard Fokker is born, the son of a Dutch tea planter, at Kediri, in Indonesia. Although he will get no formal technical training and will be only 24 when World War I starts, his Fokker triplane will be widely regarded as the war’s best aircraft.

1926: Walter Varney Airlines makes its first flight from Pasco, Washington, to Elkhorn, Nevada.  It will later become better known as United Airlines.

1930: One of the great advances in snack foods occurs, as the Continental Baking Co. invents the Hostess Twinkie. Today, a half-billion are produced each year.

1933: Sir Royston Miles Goode (left), Emeritus Professor of Law at Cambridge and founder of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London, is born.

1998: Tammy Wynette, a hairdresser who took up singing to make extra money when her baby was stricken with spinal meningitis, dies at Nashville, Tennessee. She renewed her cosmetology license every year of her life, in case she ever had to go back to it.