January 5 » Dreyfus affair: French army officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island.
February 1 » Fountains Valley, Pretoria, the oldest nature reserve in Africa, is proclaimed by President Paul Kruger.
April 3 » The trial in the libel case brought by Oscar Wilde begins, eventually resulting in his imprisonment on charges of homosexuality.
June 20 » The Kiel Canal, crossing the base of the Jutland peninsula and the busiest artificial waterway in the world, is officially opened.
October 22 » In Paris an express train derails after overrunning the buffer stop, crossing almost 30 metres (100ft) of concourse before crashing through a wall and falling 10 metres (33ft) to the road below.
December 28 » Wilhelm Röntgen publishes a paper detailing his discovery of a new type of radiation, which later will be known as x-rays.
Day of death April 30, 1953
The temperature on April 30, 1953 was between 5.2 °C and 14.5 °C and averaged 10.4 °C. There was 1.0 hours of sunshine (7%). The heavily clouded was. The average windspeed was 4 Bft (moderate breeze) and was prevailing from the south-southwest. Source: KNMI
January 5 » The play Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett receives its première in Paris.
April 25 » Francis Crick and James Watson publish "Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" describing the double helix structure of DNA.
September 7 » Nikita Khrushchev is elected first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
September 12 » U.S. Senator and future President John Fitzgerald Kennedy marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island.
November 21 » The Natural History Museum, London announces that the "Piltdown Man" skull, initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found, is a hoax.
December 9 » Red Scare: General Electric announces that all communist employees will be discharged from the company.
When copying data from this family tree, please include a reference to the origin: Hendrik Dreyer, "Dreyer Tree", database, Genealogy Online (https://www.genealogieonline.nl/dreyer-tree/I16701.php : accessed January 17, 2026), "Marthinus Christoffel Dreyer (1871-1953)".
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