6. März

His father Lodovico, the town’s podestà, wrote the birth down as 6 March 1474 in the Florentine style, where the new year had not yet begun. It is entered here as he wrote it, and falls in 1475.

Pigafetta: they ate biscuit crawling with worms, sawdust, and the leather chafing-gear off the yards, soaked in the sea to soften it. A rat sold for half a ducat. Scurvy killed at least nineteen men.

At the height of his power, Ferdinand II ordered the return of all church lands Protestants had taken since 1552: two archbishoprics, a dozen bishoprics and hundreds of monasteries. It turned even loyal Lutheran Saxony against him.

Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Society’s secretary, printed the letters he received from all over Europe. Two months after the Paris Journal des sçavans, it is the longest-running scientific journal in the world.

An outnumbered Union army won in the Ozarks and kept Missouri out of Confederate hands. Two Cherokee regiments fought on the Confederate side, one of them under Stand Watie. Union losses were 1,349; Confederate estimates run from 2,000 to 2,500 (NPS).

In Mendeleev's absence, his colleague Nikolai Menshutkin presented the paper to the newly founded Russian Chemical Society on 6 March (18 March in the West). It appeared in the Society's journal that year, and a short German abstract carried it to the rest of Europe, where Lothar Meyer published a…

Five spacecraft from three space agencies met the comet within nine days, and shared what they found so that each could aim better. The Soviet Vegas went first; their positions of the nucleus steered Europe’s Giotto in close.

It passed about 8,900 km from the nucleus. Its position fixed the nucleus well enough for Europe’s Giotto to aim for a pass of a few hundred kilometres: the Pathfinder arrangement the space agencies agreed between them.

It passed about 8,900 km from the nucleus and sent back the first pictures of it, blurred by dust and glare, on the way home from dropping a lander and a balloon at Venus.

Safaricom let people send money by text message and cash it out at corner shops. Within a decade nearly every Kenyan household used it, and one study found it had lifted 194,000 households out of extreme poverty.

Safaricom let Kenyans send money as a text message and turn it into cash at corner-shop agents. Within a decade it had lifted an estimated 2 percent of Kenyan households out of extreme poverty.