1 August in history
7 events that happened on 1 August, from 30 BCE to 1944.
✦ Anniversary of the day
30 BCE 1,996 years ago
Octavian takes Alexandria and Mark Antony takes his own life
Octavian's army entered Alexandria and Mark Antony, defeated and deserted, killed himself. Cleopatra's suicide days later ended the Ptolemaic dynasty and Egypt became a Roman province.
1291 CE 735 years ago
Swiss cantons swear the alliance celebrated as Switzerland's birth
Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden concluded a perpetual defensive alliance, recorded in the Federal Charter dated early August 1291. 1 August is now Swiss National Day.
1714 CE 312 years ago
Queen Anne dies, ending the Stuart line
Queen Anne died without surviving children, the last Stuart monarch. Under the Act of Settlement the crown passed to George, Elector of Hanover, beginning the Hanoverian dynasty.
1774 CE 252 years ago
Joseph Priestley isolates oxygen
By heating mercuric oxide, Joseph Priestley produced a gas in which a candle burned with remarkable vigour. He called it 'dephlogisticated air'; Lavoisier later named it oxygen.
1793 CE 233 years ago
France's Convention adopts the metric system
The National Convention decreed a provisional metre, based on a fraction of the Earth's meridian, as France's unit of length. The decimal metric system has since been adopted almost worldwide.
