14. Dezember

Into the Vienna lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit (Beneficence). Haydn joined another lodge in February 1785 and Leopold was admitted that April, on his visit. Masonic ideals run through The Magic Flute.

A last issue of lottery bonds had failed to find buyers. The company suspended payments, and on 4 February 1889 a Paris court ordered it wound up. Some 800,000 French investors lost their money.

Wilbur won the toss for the first try. The Flyer left its launching rail on the slope of Big Kill Devil Hill, but he pulled the elevator too hard: it climbed, stalled after three and a half seconds and dug into the sand. The repairs took two days.

At three in the afternoon, by dead reckoning, the five halted and planted the flag together, naming the plateau after King Haakon VII. Over the next two days they boxed the Pole: skiing out in three directions and moving camp to take a full day of hourly sights, to be sure that one of them had…

Amundsen, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting, with four sledges and 52 dogs, on skis. From 80° south they raised snow cairns the height of a man to mark the way home: due south from Framheim, over an unknown range and onto the plateau.

The first woman elected to the House of Commons won Dublin St Patrick’s for Sinn Féin while in Holloway prison. Like her party she never took the seat; Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit, in 1919.

Kyoto’s students asked how he had come to relativity, and he told them, unscripted. Ishiwara’s notes are the source of the story of the talk with Besso and of the happiest thought at the patent-office desk.

Irritated at a cinema where an actor’s voice came from one loudspeaker wherever he stood on the screen, the EMI engineer Alan Blumlein filed a patent for two-channel sound. It included the groove that stereo records use to this day, one channel on each wall. Blumlein died in 1942 testing radar in…

It swept by at about 34,800 km, scanning the disc with its microwave and infrared radiometers for 42 minutes. The readings showed a hot surface under cool cloud tops.

Officially Laos was neutral, so the bombing was secret. In about 580,000 missions the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance, on the Trail in the south and on the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese around the Plain of Jars in the north. About 30 percent of the cluster bomblets…

We leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. — Gene Cernan Apollo 17 also carried Harrison Schmitt, a geologist and the only scientist to walk on the Moon.

On a visit to the Gurgaon plant, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave the keys of the first Maruti 800 to Harpal Singh of Delhi, who had won the first car in a draw. Built with Suzuki, it cost 47,500 rupees and put India’s middle class on four wheels.

Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew Burt Rutan’s spindly Voyager around the world from Edwards and back in 9 days 3 minutes 44 seconds, the first flight around the world without landing or refuelling.

The first transatlantic fibre-optic cable sent pulses of laser light instead of electric current, and carried about 40,000 calls at once against TAT-1’s 36. Fibre soon carried most of the internet between continents.

The first soft landing on the Moon since Luna 24 in 1976, and China’s first on any world. It set down the rover Yutu, the “Jade Rabbit”, on Mare Imbrium.