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She died in her nursing home yesterday, after living an incredible 117-year life.

Japanese Misao Okawa was the world's oldest person, and as such the breadth of history she would have witnessed during her long life is barely imaginable.

From her birth on March 5 1898, when Queen Victoria still had three years left to go on the British throne, we chart her 117 years through the world events unfolding around her.

In Misao Okawa's lifetime

5 March 1898 - Misao Okawa is born in Japan to a kimono maker.

24 March 1898 - the first automobile is sold.

11 October 1899 The descendants of the Dutch fight for independence from Britain in the Boer War. Machine guns and barb wire used for the first time.

Her second century

22 January 1901 Queen Victoria's eldest son takes the British throne as King Edward VII.

14 Sept 1901 Theodore Roosevelt becomes US president.

June-Nov 1905 Albert Einstein publishes his theory of relativity.

6 May 1910 George V takes the British throne.

15 April 1912 The unsinkable Titanic goes down with over 1,500 souls.

(Image: Getty)

4 March 1913 Woodrow Wilson becomes US president.

3 August 1914 Germany declares war on France starting the "war to end all wars".

April 1916 Ernest Shackleton, Frank Worsley, and four others begin a treacherous 800-mile ocean crossing from Antarctica to South Georgia Island in what will be the greatest sailing journey of all time.

15 Sept 1928 Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming notices penicillin mold killing a staphylococcus culture. The revolution of antibiotics is started.

The Thirties

20 Jan 1936 Edward VIII takes the British throne, but abdicated on December 11 to marry divorcee Wallis Simpson. His brother George VI takes the throne.

1 Sept 1939 Germany invades Poland starting World War II. Before the war ends 70 million people will die, with two-thirds being civilians. On average nearly 30,000 people will die daily during this war.

The Forties

7 Dec 1941 353 Japanese planes and 5 midget submarines launch a surprise attack on the US military bases at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii sinking four battleships and killing 2,401 Americans.

2 Dec 1942 At the University of Chicago Enrico Fermi and friends generate the first self-sustained nuclear reaction.

9 March 1945 The most deadly single day air raid in WWII occurs when Tokyo is fire-bombed resulting in over 100,000 causalities.

14 August 1945 VJ Day - Japan surrenders in WWII eight days after the second atom bomb is dropped.

The Fifties

6 February 1952 Queen Elizabeth takes to the British throne.

4 Oct 1957 Sputnik I becomes the first man-made satellite.

The Sixties

20 January 1961 US president JFK takes office. He is assassinated on 22 November 1963.

11 April 1961 Yuri A. Gargarin becomes the first human in space and to orbit the earth.

28 August 1963 Black civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King delivers his I Have A Dream speech.

20 July 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin land on the moon.

(Image: Getty)

The Seventies

12 Jan 1976 Concorde begins its first commercial flight.

25 July 1978 Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first test tube baby, is born in Oldham, Greater Manchester.

The Eighties

8 December 1980 John Lennon is shot dead outside his New York home by 25-year-old Mark Chapman.

9 November 1989 After separating East and West Germany for 28 years, the Berlin Wall falls.

The Nineties

1990 Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the first web browser at CERN.

5 July 1996 Dolly the sheep, the first mammal to be successfully cloned from an adult cell, is born at the Roslin Institute in Midlothian, Scotland.

Her third century

11 September 2001 Al-Qaeda terrorists hijack four commercial airliners en route to Los Angeles and San Francisco. American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 are flown into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York.

4 February 2004 Facebook is founded by Mark Zuckerberg.

20 Jan 2009 The first US black president Barack Obama takes office.

(Image: Getty)

Most recently

14 October 2012 Felix Baumgartner jumps from 127,000 feet down to earth, breaking all sound barriers.

12 November 2014 European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft and its lander module Philae made history when it successfully landed on the surface of a comet.