Today in History - July 28 | 'Elevator Girl' survives 75-storey fall
Lift operator Betty Lou Oliver (left) cheated death twice in a matter of minutes. She was thrown from her elevator car on the 80th floor and suffered severe burns in the initial crash.
First aid workers placed her on another elevator car, but its damaged cables snapped, sending her plummeting 75 storeys, or more than 300 metres.
Miraculously, Oliver survived that fall too, with the broken elevator cables acting as a de factor spring, while it's also thought the air being rapidly compressed by the falling elevator acted as a cushion.
Nonetheless Oliver was severely injured, breaking her neck, back, and pelvis. Astonishingly, she was able to make a recovery.
The blaze remains the highest-level fire ever extinguished by New York firefighters, and Oliver - dubbed "Elevator Girl" by the press - still holds the record for surviving the longest elevator fall.
Then-US President Herbert Hoover ordered US troops, including six tanks, to attack a camp of impoverished WWI veterans in Washington DC on July 28, 1932.
The 43,000 strong group of marchers, which included 17,000 war veterans, their families, and supporters, were calling for an early cash-in on their war service bonuses to help them survive the Great Depression.
The group was dubbed the "Bonus Army" by the press.
The veterans had received bonus certificates but were not able to redeem them until 1945.
The veterans kept their camps under strict control, with shelters, sanitation facilities, streets, and even daily marches.
Nonetheless, police were ordered to clear the camp out on July 28, with officers shooting dead two veterans.
This was followed by a clash with federal troops led by General Douglas Macarthur, including six tanks in support, who drove the veterans out and destroyed the camp.
The two men shot, William Hushka and Eric Carlson, were as veterans later interred in Arlington National Cemetery.
Lawyer, statesman, and leader of the French Revolution, Maximilien Robespierre, was executed by guillotine on July 28, 1794, in Paris.
Robespierre had been one of the principal architects of post-monarchical France, including authoring its famed motto "Liberte, egalite, fraternite".
However, he was also the driving force of the period of arrests, executions, and purges known as the Reign of Terror. He was among several revolutionary leaders arrested on July 27 when the governing Convention came to fear another purge was in the works.
Robespierre was shot in the face during his arrest, shattering his jaw.
He and 21 of his partisans were condemned to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal the next day, with the sentence carried out before the day was done.
Ensuring Robespierre's neck was bared for the guillotine, the executioner tore off the paper bandage that was holding the latter's broken jaw in place, ensuring that the eloquent orator's last words were in fact an agonised scream, before the blade fell.
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