18. Juli

The Black regiment led a night assault across the sand of Morris Island. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed on the parapet, and Sergeant William Carney, badly wounded, carried the flag back. The fort held, but the attack silenced doubts that Black troops would fight.

Pierre and Marie Curie announced a new element in pitchblende, hundreds of times more active than uranium, and named it for her partitioned Poland. The same note coined the word “radio-active”.

The first new element, found by chemically sifting pitchblende and following the activity. The paper coined the word radio-active and named the element for “the country of origin of one of us”, a country that did not then exist on the map.

In a note to the Académie des sciences, Pierre and Marie Curie reported a substance from pitchblende 400 times as active as uranium, and proposed to call it polonium, after the country of origin of one of them. The note is also where the word “radio-active” first appears.

In 1908 Jean Perrin in Paris tracked grains of gamboge resin under a microscope and found them wandering just as the formula said. The last doubters of atoms, the chemist Wilhelm Ostwald among them, gave in, and Perrin won the 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Needing a word for resistance that was not “passive”, Indian Opinion ran a competition. His cousin Maganlal suggested sadagraha, firmness in a good cause, and Gandhi changed it to satyagraha: holding firmly to truth. Eight years of it sent thousands of Indians to jail.

He came for a year, to help a Muslim merchant house from Porbandar, Dada Abdulla & Co., with a lawsuit, and stayed twenty-one years. Natal and the Transvaal had some 100,000 Indians, most of them indentured labourers on the sugar estates and their descendants, and a growing thicket of laws against…

General Lavr Kornilov, a Cossack’s son who had escaped from Austrian captivity, replaced Brusilov. He asked for the death penalty at the front and in the rear, and the right took him up as its saviour.

With Russia out, Ludendorff moved divisions west and gambled on winning before the Americans arrived in force. Short, heavy bombardments and storm troops gained more ground than anyone had since 1914, and the Germans reached the Marne again, but they ran out of men and supplies.

Benjamin Weill-Hallé and Raymond Turpin gave BCG by mouth to a newborn whose mother had died of tuberculosis and who was to be raised by a grandmother with the disease. The child stayed well. A century on, BCG is still given to babies in much of the world.

Ambedkar’s speech to a Lahore reform society was cancelled when its hosts read it, so he printed it: caste could not be reformed, only destroyed, and with it the scriptures that sanctioned it. In Harijan Gandhi condemned untouchability but defended varna, hereditary callings, as a law of life.…

Andersson beat Hägg head to head. The record now stood 1.6 seconds from four minutes.

The British Parliament’s act created two dominions, India and Pakistan, from 15 August 1947, and ended the king’s title of Emperor of India.

Honduras and El Salvador met three times in the 1970 qualifiers amid riots and a quarrel over Salvadoran settlers in Honduras. After El Salvador won the play-off in Mexico City, the two went to war: about 100 hours of fighting. Official counts put the dead at about two hundred; other estimates run…

Armstrong and Aldrin opened the tunnel and floated into the lunar module for the first time, during a 96-minute colour television broadcast.

The 14-year-old Romanian scored the first 10 in Olympic gymnastics, on the uneven bars. The scoreboard had room for only three digits and showed 1.00. She scored six more 10s in Montreal.

The Pasteur team isolated a second, related virus from patients from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. HIV-2 comes from the sooty mangabey, not the chimpanzee, and is less easily transmitted; it has stayed mostly in West Africa.

The 24-year-old Motorola rider, Olympic road champion in 1992, crashed with several others on a fast bend of the descent and struck a concrete block. He was flown to hospital in Tarbes and died there. The next day the peloton rode the stage as a tribute.

On his eightieth birthday he married the widow of Samora Machel, Mozambique’s first president. She is the only woman to have been first lady of two countries.

Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation paid $580 million for Intermix Media, Myspace’s parent. For a while it looked like a bargain: in 2006 Myspace was the most visited website in the United States.

Twenty-seven years and eleven days, the longest reign since the IAAF began keeping the record.

In the Emsley Carr Mile at the London Diamond League, paced by Brannon Kidder and Žan Rudolf through 800 metres, before a crowd of 60,000. The Scot took 0.47 seconds off El Guerrouj’s record and became the first man under 3:43. Subject to ratification.

Pending ratification by World Athletics.