From Francis Drake’s knighthood on the deck of the Golden Hind in 1581 to the ceasefire that ended Angola’s civil war in 2002, 4 April has seen the first American president to die in office, a great earthquake in the Himalayas, the founding of Microsoft, the Beatles holding the top five places in the American charts and the first flight of the space shuttle Challenger. This timeline follows the date across more than four centuries.
Exploration, political change, scientific development and expanding global connections.
Six months after returning from the first English voyage around the world, laden with Spanish treasure, Francis Drake was knighted in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I on board his ship, the Golden Hind, at Deptford on the Thames. The Queen dined on board, and the ship was kept at Deptford for the public to visit.
Source: Royal Museums Greenwich: Sir Francis Drake, pirate or hero? ↗Industry, empire, invention, reform and a century of enormous transformation.
President William Henry Harrison died in the White House of pneumonia, exactly one month after his inauguration, at which he had spoken for nearly two hours in cold, wet weather. He was 68. His vice-president, John Tyler, insisted that he was now fully president, setting the rule followed ever since.
Source: Miller Center, University of Virginia: William Henry Harrison, death of the president ↗War and peace, technological leaps, social change, politics, sport and popular culture.
A US Geological Survey map of the shaking in the 1905 Kangra earthquake.Image: US Geological Survey · CC0Shortly after six in the morning, an earthquake of about magnitude 7.8 struck the Kangra valley in the Himalayan foothills of northern India. More than 19,000 people were killed, and the towns of Kangra and Dharamsala were largely destroyed. It was caused by India’s slow collision with the rest of Asia.
Source: US Geological Survey: M 7.9, 1905 Kangra earthquake ↗
The authentication page of an official copy of the North Atlantic Treaty, signed and sealed by the US Secretary of State Dean Acheson.Image: Photo by Daniel Bright · Public domainOn 4 April 1949, in Washington, the foreign ministers of the United States, Canada and ten Western European countries signed the North Atlantic Treaty, creating NATO. The treaty is short, just 14 articles. Its heart is Article 5: an armed attack on one member is to be treated as an attack on them all. Formed as the Cold War deepened, the alliance has grown from 12 members to more than 30, and Article 5 has been invoked only once, after the attacks on the United States in September 2001.
Source: NATO: The founding treaty ↗
The Beatles arrive at Kennedy Airport in New York, February 1964.Image: United Press International, photographer unknown · Public domainOn the Billboard Hot 100 chart dated 4 April 1964, the Beatles held all of the top five places in America: ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, ‘Twist and Shout’, ‘She Loves You’, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ and ‘Please Please Me’. Just two months after their first visit to the United States, it was the peak of Beatlemania. No other act has ever held the entire top five at once.
Source: Billboard: April 4, 1964, the Beatles make Hot 100 history ↗
The Lorraine Motel in Memphis, now part of the National Civil Rights Museum; a wreath marks the balcony outside Room 306, 2022.Image: Bubba73 · CC BY-SA 3.0Just after six in the evening on 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr was standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to support striking sanitation workers, when he was shot by a sniper. He died in hospital an hour later, aged 39. His death set off riots in more than a hundred American cities. James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to the killing and was sentenced to 99 years. Days later Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, one of the civil rights laws King had fought for.
Source: Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University: Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. ↗
An Altair 8800 home computer, the machine for which Microsoft wrote its first product.Image: Swtpc6800 en:User:Swtpc6800 Michael Holley · Public domainMicrosoft dates its founding to 4 April 1975, when two friends from Seattle, Bill Gates, then 19, and Paul Allen, 22, set up a partnership in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their first product was a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, an early home computer sold as a kit. The name, first written Micro-Soft, joined ‘microcomputer’ and ‘software’. The company moved to the Seattle area in 1979, and its MS-DOS and Windows systems went on to run most of the world’s personal computers.
Source: Microsoft: 50th anniversary ↗
Nurses care for Vietnamese children on an Operation Babylift flight arriving at San Francisco, 5 April 1975.Image: Unknown photographer (US National Archives) · Public domainAs North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon, the United States began flying orphaned children out of South Vietnam. The first official flight, a huge C-5A transport, suffered a blown-out rear door soon after take-off and crash-landed in rice fields; more than 130 people, most of them children, were killed. The airlift went on, and some 3,000 children were flown to new homes abroad.
Source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library: Operation Babylift ↗
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto as President of Pakistan, in the early 1970s.Image: Unknown photographer. Office of President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. · Public domainIn the early hours of 4 April 1979 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s former president and prime minister, was hanged in Rawalpindi jail. He had been overthrown in a military coup by General Zia-ul-Haq in 1977 and convicted of conspiring to murder a political opponent. World leaders had appealed for clemency. His daughter Benazir later led his party and became prime minister, and in 2024 Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled that he had not received a fair trial.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ↗
Challenger in orbit in June 1983, on its second mission, photographed from a free-flying satellite.Image: NASA · Public domainThe second space shuttle, Challenger, lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on its first mission, STS-6, on 4 April 1983. Its crew of four released the first of NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellites. Three days later Story Musgrave and Donald Peterson made the first spacewalk of the shuttle programme. Challenger flew nine missions, including those of the first American woman and the first Black American in space, before it broke apart soon after launch in January 1986.
Source: NASA: STS-6 ↗The events of recent decades that have already become part of the historical record.
A tank wrecked by a landmine, a relic of the civil war, in Angola, 2006.Image: MaraJara · CC BY-SA 4.0On 4 April 2002, in the capital Luanda, the commanders of Angola’s army and of the UNITA rebels formally signed a ceasefire agreement, the Luena Memorandum. It came six weeks after the UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in battle. The war had begun at independence from Portugal in 1975 and, fed by the Cold War, had lasted 27 years, costing hundreds of thousands of lives and leaving the country strewn with landmines. Angola marks 4 April as Peace Day.
Source: UN Peacemaker: Luena Memorandum of Understanding ↗Selected authoritative references supporting the events on this page.
This page is not the longest possible list of events. It is a chronological journey through 4 April, where each entry is chosen for historical significance, human interest and reliability.
Facts are checked against authoritative museums, archives, universities and reference works. Where sources disagree, the page says so.
Discover the lighter side of the date with famous birthdays, culture, firsts and lives remembered.
A full-size replica of the Golden Hind at Southwark, London.Image: 
William Henry Harrison.Image: