28. Juli

The crusade attacked the one Muslim city that had been the kingdom’s ally, then moved from the orchards to the bare east side, gave up after four days and blamed treachery. Ibn al-Qalanisi, inside the city, dates the first battle Saturday 6 Rabiʿ I 543, 24 July; the tabular calendar puts 6 Rabiʿ I…

Timur’s army routed the Ottomans north-east of Ankara, after Bayezid’s Anatolian vassals went over to their old lords. The sultan was taken prisoner and died in captivity at Akşehir the next spring.

The city council chose Bach only after Georg Philipp Telemann and Christoph Graupner were not to be had. For twenty-seven years he wrote and led the music of Leipzig’s main churches, at first a new cantata almost every Sunday. He died in office on 28 July 1750, the date that conventionally ends…

Within months of his accession he was the only male of the dynasty left alive. He destroyed the Janissaries, lost Greece, fought his own governor of Egypt, and put his officials in the fez and frock coat.

“Four days in hell, knocking about in a sort of maelstrom.” The wind is a tempest and no one sleeps; the second mate volunteers to steer and watch while the men rest.

Sir John Hall presented it: sheets glued end to end on a roll some 270 metres long, which he unrolled down the aisle of the House until it hit the far wall. It is now on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register.

The declaration went to Belgrade by telegram. Austro-Hungarian monitors on the Danube shelled Belgrade that night: the first shots of the war.

Aeroplanes went to war as unarmed scouts and came out of it as fighters, bombers and ground-attack machines, built by the tens of thousands. The engines, the factories and the pilots left over made the airlines of the 1920s.

In ten years the aeroplane went from a 12-second hop to crossing the Channel and the Mediterranean. Most of it happened in France, where the Wrights’ secrecy left the field open until Wilbur came to Le Mans in 1908.

Marie Curie and her daughter Irène, aged 17, drove X-ray cars to the front; she equipped twenty radiological cars and about two hundred fixed posts. Lise Meitner served as an X-ray nurse in the Austrian army. Chadwick, caught studying in Berlin, spent the war interned at Ruhleben racecourse; Hahn…

A flame burned in a tower above the stadium for the first time, and women ran and jumped at the Olympics for the first time, in five athletics events. Exhausted finishers in the 800 metres gave officials an excuse to drop it until 1960.

A police raid on an after-hours bar at 12th Street and Clairmount set off the deadliest disorder of the “long, hot summer”. The Kerner Commission counted 43 dead, most of them Black, and more than 7,000 arrested; Johnson sent in Army paratroopers.

Run by a private committee with almost no public money, the Games made a surplus, and every city wanted one again. Carl Lewis won the same four events as Jesse Owens in 1936.

Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith’s team shredded the DNA of the bacterium Haemophilus influenzae into random pieces, sequenced them all and let a computer assemble the 1.83 million letters: proof that whole-genome shotgun sequencing worked.

Testing hundreds of chimpanzee droppings collected in the forest, Keele and colleagues found the virus closest to HIV-1 group M in chimpanzees of south-eastern Cameroon. The Sangha river flows from there towards Kinshasa.

Tesla gave the first 30 cars to employees at Fremont. Promised at $35,000 with a range of 220 miles, it had over half a million reservations: Tesla’s first car for the mass market.