29. August

Süleyman’s first campaign took the fortress where Mehmed II had failed in 1456. With it went the key to Hungary: the Danube road north was open.

29 August 1526 in the Julian calendar the Hungarians used; 20 Dhu al-Qaʿda 932 in the Ottoman record, which the tabular calendar would draw a day early. The battle lasted about two hours. King Louis II drowned in a flooded stream as he fled, at twenty, and the kingdom of Hungary split between two…

The Dutch West India Company took the castle after a short siege, and in 1641 seized Luanda too, holding it until 1648. Portugal’s monopoly was over: Dutch, English, French and Danish traders now built forts along the coast.

With Spanish and British invaders at the border and the insurgents holding the plains, the French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax declared every enslaved person in the North province free. The other provinces followed within weeks.

Back from a geology tour of North Wales with Adam Sedgwick, Darwin found Henslow’s letter: Captain Robert FitzRoy wanted a gentleman naturalist to share his cabin. His father said no, unless he could find “any man of common sense” who advised going. His uncle Josiah Wedgwood did, and the next day…

After a select committee heard mill children describe beatings and deformities, the Act barred children under nine from textile mills, limited those aged nine to thirteen to nine hours a day, and required two hours of schooling. Four inspectors were appointed to enforce it.

Britain went to war to win compensation for the destroyed opium and open China to trade. The Royal Navy did most of the fighting, but the Company supplied ships, Indian troops and, above all, the opium revenue at stake.

Signed aboard HMS Cornwallis to end the First Opium War. The Qing ceded Hong Kong Island, opened five ports to British trade and agreed to pay 21 million silver dollars: the first of the unequal treaties.

Signed aboard HMS Cornwallis on the Yangtze. China ceded Hong Kong, opened five ports and paid 21 million dollars, including six million for the destroyed opium. The treaty did not mention the drug, and the trade went on.

In a single decree the government abolished the more than 260 domains and replaced them with prefectures run by governors from Tokyo. The daimyo were pensioned off and moved to the capital. Japanese calendar: Meiji 4, 7th month, 14th day

The first great flying meeting, on the plain of Bétheny, backed by the champagne houses. Henri Farman flew 180 kilometres in just over three hours, and the American Glenn Curtiss won the first Gordon Bennett speed trophy.

A treaty signed on 22 August by Prime Minister Yi Wan-yong and Resident-General Terauchi Masatake took effect: Korea became a Japanese colony under a governor-general until 1945. In Korea the day is remembered as National Humiliation Day.

Paid for largely by the newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst, the airship circled the globe from Lakehurst to Lakehurst in about 21 days, stopping only at Friedrichshafen, Tokyo and Los Angeles.

RDS-1, a close copy of the American Fat Man design passed on by spies, exploded on a tower on the Kazakh steppe with a yield of about 22 kilotons. An American weather plane picked up its fallout days later, and Truman told the world on 23 September. The American monopoly had lasted four years.

David Tudor sat at the piano, closed the lid to mark each of three movements, and played nothing. The music was the room: in the open-sided hall in the woods, wind, then rain on the roof, then the audience talking and walking out.

Mona Best turned the cellar of her West Derby house into a club for teenagers, and the Quarrymen, who had helped paint it, played the opening night. Her son Pete Best had a drum kit; a year later that got him a place in the band.

A U-2 photographed SA-2 anti-aircraft sites going up across western Cuba. The CIA director, John McCone, reasoned that they were there to guard something worth hiding, such as ballistic missiles; most analysts thought them purely defensive.

Eleven songs and about half an hour, to 25,000 people, with 7,000 tickets unsold. Knowing it was the end, they took cameras on stage, and McCartney had their press officer Tony Barrow tape it. The last song was “Long Tall Sally”.

From low on the bill of a Helen Shapiro package tour to stadiums on four continents. By 1966 the screaming was so loud that the band could not hear themselves, played the same half-hour set every night, and stopped altogether.

Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg's team at GSI fired iron at bismuth for days and saw a single atom of element 109. One was enough: its chain of decays pointed back to it beyond doubt. It was named after Lise Meitner in 1997.

Legasov led the Soviet delegation and spoke for about five hours to hundreds of experts. The report that followed, INSAG-1, laid the blame mainly on the operators.

The Games went home. The shot put was held at ancient Olympia, and the marathon followed the 1896 course from Marathon to the Panathenaic Stadium.