10. Juli

The shore party was told it was Thursday. By the ship's careful log it was Wednesday, 9 July. Sailing west round the world they had lost a day: the first people to meet the problem the date line now solves.

Balthasar Gérard, a Catholic from Franche-Comté drawn by Philip II’s price on William’s head, shot him on the stairs of his residence in Delft; the holes are still shown in the wall. Holland had taken the Gregorian calendar at the turn of 1583, so this date is New Style.

The Alps followed the Pyrenees a year later. On the Galibier, over 2,500 metres on a gravel track, only Émile Georget, Paul Duboc and Gustave Garrigou rode to the top without walking.

Facing arrest, Lenin shaved his beard and hid with Zinoviev in a haymaker’s shack by the lake at Razliv, then fled to Finland. There he wrote The State and Revolution. Trotsky and others went to prison.

The Finn won the 1500 metres and then, less than an hour later, the 5000 metres, running with a stopwatch in his hand. He left Paris with five gold medals and finished his career with nine.

Twenty years of restoration under Henri Deneux, who gave it a roof frame of reinforced-concrete sections in place of the burned timber, much of it paid for by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

The Luftwaffe tried to destroy the RAF as a prelude to invasion. Fighter Command, guided by radar, held on. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. — Winston Churchill, 20 August 1940

The Luftwaffe tried to win control of the air over southern England before an invasion. Radar and a system of fighter control let the RAF meet the raids, and Hitler put the invasion off in September. Of the pilots Churchill said: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to…

Nine days later Andersson ran the same 4:06.2. The record was shared.

The Allies landed in Sicily in July 1943 and fought up the peninsula for almost two years against German defensive lines drawn across the mountains. Mussolini fell on 25 July 1943, and the Germans in Italy surrendered on 2 May 1945, days before the rest.

The soundtrack on one side, new songs on the other, and every song by Lennon and McCartney: the only Beatles album without a cover or a Harrison song. It opens with a single chord that guitarists still argue about.

The Romanian’s record lasted seven years, and three of the women’s records before it had also been Romanian.

It opened with 500 apps. Letting outside developers sell software for the phone, which Apple had resisted, turned it into a platform; Google's Android Market followed in October.

It began when Apple’s App Store opened with games among its first 500 apps. Free games paid for by in-app purchases took over, and phones became the biggest games platform, with about half the world’s games revenue.