SMS König was the first of four König class dreadnought battleships of the German Imperial Navy during World War I. König (Eng: "King") was named in honor of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Laid down in October 1911, the ship was launched on 1 March 1913. Construction on König finished shortly after the outbreak of World War I; she was commissioned into the High Seas Fleet on 9 August 1914. Along with her three sister ships, Grosser Kurfürst, Markgraf, and Kronprinz, König took part in most of the fleet actions during the war. As the leading ship in the German line on 31 May 1916 in the Battle of Jutland, König was heavily engaged by several British battleships and suffered ten large-caliber shell hits. In October 1917, she forced the Russian pre-dreadnought battleship Slava to scuttle itself during Operation Albion. König was interned, along with the majority of the High Seas Fleet, in Scapa Flow in November 1918 following the Armistice. On 21 June 1919, Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter gave the order to scuttle the fleet while the British guard ships were out of the harbor on exercises. König slipped beneath the waters of Scapa Flow at 14:00. Unlike most of the other scuttled ships, König was never raised for scrapping; the wreck is still sitting on the bottom of the bay.
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_________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1611:
The University of Santo Tomas in Manila, one of the oldest existing universities in Asia and one of the world's largest Catholic universities in terms of enrollment, was founded.
1789:
About 1,300 miles west of Tahiti, near Tonga, Fletcher Christian, the master's mate on board the Royal Navy ship HMAV Bounty, led a mutiny against the ship's commander William Bligh.
1910:
Frenchman Louis Paulhan won the London to Manchester air race, the first long-distance aeroplane race in England.
1944:
World War II: During Exercise Tiger, a full-scale rehearsal for the invasion of Normandy, German S-boats attacked an Allied convoy, killing 946 American servicemen.
2008:
The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, at the time the world's highest residence above ground-level at 1,389 feet (423 m), held its full service grand opening.
_______________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
kitchen supper (n) An informal or semiformal meal served for guests, not necessarily one served in the kitchen.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kitchen_supper
______________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
“The secret is not to dream … The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I'm going. You cannot fool me anymore. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine.” I'll never be like this again, she thought, as she saw the terror in the Queen's face. I'll never again feel as tall as the sky and as old as the hills and as strong as the sea. I've been given something for a while, and the price of it is that I have to give it back. And the reward is giving it back, too. No human could live like this. You could spend a day looking at a flower to see how wonderful it is, and that wouldn't get the milking done. No wonder we dream our way through our lives. To be awake, and see it all as it really is … no one could stand that for long.
-- Terry Pratchett https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Terry_Pratchett