2. August

Hannibal let the Roman centre push into his line, then closed his wings and cavalry around it: the double envelopment generals have studied ever since. Polybius puts the Roman dead at 70,000, Livy at about 48,000, in a single afternoon.

Not on the 4th: the handwritten parchment was signed by most delegates on 2 August, and a few signed later still. What went out on 5 July was John Dunlap’s printed broadside.

Parliament transferred the Company’s territories, army and powers to the Crown. A Secretary of State for India replaced the Board of Control and the directors. On 1 November Canning read Queen Victoria’s proclamation at Allahabad, and Company rule was over.

Farragut’s fleet forced the entrance to the bay; the army besieged the forts until Fort Morgan fell on 23 August. Blockade runners lost the last major Confederate port on the Gulf east of Texas. 1,822 casualties (NPS).

A cry outside the captain’s port, and one more man gone from watch. The mate says that in a break in the fog he saw the North Foreland, which means the ship is past the Straits of Dover and in the North Sea.

General Charles Bruce led the first attempt on the summit, with about 160 men. It was the first to carry bottled oxygen: four cylinders on a frame, some 14.5 kilograms. The porters called it “English air”, and several climbers thought using it unsporting.

Unsure a state notary could give a federal oath, he took it again privately in Washington weeks later. He signed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.

He died at the Palace Hotel on the way back from a western speaking tour that had taken him to Alaska, the first president to visit the territory.

Szilárd, with Eugene Wigner and then Edward Teller, drove out to Einstein’s summer cottage. The letter he drafted warned that uranium might make “extremely powerful bombs of a new type”, and that Germany had stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovak mines it had seized.

Leo Szilárd came out to his summer cottage, first with Eugene Wigner and then with Edward Teller at the wheel. The letter warned that uranium might make “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” and that Germany had stopped sales of Czech uranium ore. Alexander Sachs handed it to Roosevelt on 11…

Truman, Stalin and Churchill met in the Crown Prince’s palace outside Berlin. Midway through, Churchill lost the British election and Clement Attlee took his place at the table.

Three North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox, on an intelligence patrol off the coast after South Vietnamese commando raids nearby. The destroyer and aircraft from the Ticonderoga drove them off; one bullet hit the Maddox.

Posts that disappear after 24 hours, copied from Snapchat down to the name. Systrom said Snapchat “deserve all the credit”. Within a year Instagram Stories had more daily users than all of Snapchat.

Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang’s Shanghai start-up let teenagers lip-sync to songs in short clips. It was Chinese-built but popular mostly in the United States and Europe, which is what made it worth buying.

ByteDance folded Musical.ly’s accounts into TikTok. In October 2018 TikTok was the most downloaded app in the United States, ahead of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.