On 29 May 1953 at the age of 33, he and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers known to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John Hunt.
After the Tour, no official sporting contact took place between New Zealand and South Africa until the early 1990s, when apartheid had been repealed. The Tour lead to a decline in the popularity of Rugby Union in New Zealand, until the 1987 Rugby World Cup. During this decline, rugby league enjoyed a period of growth
The Wahine disaster occurred on 10 April 1968 when the TEV Wahine, a New Zealand inter-island ferry of the Union Company, capsized near Steeple Rock. Of the 610 passengers and 123 crew on board, 53 people lost their lives.
The wrecking of the Wahine is by far the best-known maritime disaster in New Zealand's history, although there have been worse with far greater loss of life
Ernest Rutherford was the first person to knowingly split the atom, in 1917 at Manchester University where he bombarded nitrogen with naturally occuring alpha particles from radioactive material and observed a proton emitted with energy higher than the alpha particle. (The nitrogen had been converted to oxygen.) The reaction is shown on the New Zealand 7c stamp of 1971.
The forces from New Zealand and Australia, fighting as part of the ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), played an important part in the Gallipoli campaign.
New Zealand is often credited with being the first country to give women the right to vote but in 1893 new Zealand was counted more as a self governing colony.
The eruption was heard clearly as far away as Blenheim and the effects of the ash in the air were observed as far south as Christchurch, over 800 km south. In Auckland the sound of the eruption and the flashing sky was thought by some to be an attack by Russian warships.
February 15, 2007 will become New Zealand Lamb Day because it is the 125th anniversary of one of the most significant milestones in New Zealand’s meat industry. It was on that day in 1882 that the first shipment of frozen meat set sail from Port Chalmers in Otago on the SS Dunedin, bound for London.
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