Snooker was invented

April 17, 1875: Moving forward now to 1875 where a man by the name of Sir Neville Francis Fitzgerald Chamberlain, a young officer with the British military was sent to be stationed on military duty in India. During dark and rainy days Chamberlain and his friends would spend a lot of time in the billiards room gambling among themselves as a pastime.

Here they would play of mixture of 'pyramids' (a game where 15 reds were set like a pyramid and each time a player potted a red his opponent would pay out) and 'black pool' (Where each player had a different colour ball and each time a opponent potted another players ball, they were out of the game).

Chamberlain took elements from each of these two games and combined them to create a brand new game and so Chamberlain was the man who invented snooker. He went on to convince his fellow officers to try out his new game which quickly became popular. In those days, snooker was a slang term for a 'new recruit' in the military, so anytime someone missed a shot the officers would say "you snooker", and so the name snooker stuck.