January 8 » Herman Hollerith is issued US patent #395,791 for the 'Art of Applying Statistics' — his punched card calculator.
January 15 » The Coca-Cola Company, then known as the Pemberton Medicine Company, is incorporated in Atlanta.
March 23 » The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community is established by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in Qadian, British India.
June 3 » The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States is completed, running 14 miles (23km) between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Oregon.
June 26 » Bangui is founded by Albert Dolisie and Alfred Uzac in what was then the upper reaches of the French Congo.
August 13 » William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut is granted United States Patent Number 408,709 for "Coin-controlled apparatus for telephones."
Day of death October 15, 1953
The temperature on October 15, 1953 was between 11.7 °C and 14.5 °C and averaged 13.0 °C. There was 0.1 mm of rain. The almost completely overcast was. The average windspeed was 2 Bft (weak wind) and was prevailing from the north. Source: KNMI
August 10 » First Indochina War: The French Union withdraws its forces from Operation Camargue against the Viet Minh in central Vietnam.
August 12 » The 7.2 Ms Ionian earthquake shakes the southern Ionian Islands with a maximum Mercalli intensity of X (Extreme). Between 445 and 800 people are killed.
September 7 » Nikita Khrushchev is elected first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
September 13 » Nikita Khrushchev is appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
October 29 » BCPA Flight 304 DC-6 crashes near San Francisco.
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/I8393.php : accessed January 22, 2026), "Jacobus Johannes van Niekerk (1889-1953)".
Copy warning
Genealogical publications are copyright protected. Although data is often retrieved from public archives, the searching, interpreting, collecting, selecting and sorting of the data results in a unique product. Copyright protected work may not simply be copied or republished.
Please stick to the following rules
Request permission to copy data or at least inform the author, chances are that the author gives permission, often the contact also leads to more exchange of data.
Do not use this data until you have checked it, preferably at the source (the archives).
State from whom you have copied the data and ideally also his/her original source.