27. Mai

The crusaders spent a year and a half before Damietta, the port guarding the Nile’s eastern branch. When they walked in, disease and hunger had killed most of the people inside.

Verrocchio’s workshop made the gilded copper ball that still crowns the cathedral’s lantern, and hoisted it into place. Decades later Leonardo reminded himself how its sections had been soldered, with burning mirrors that concentrated the sun.

Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop made the copper ball, and hoisted it onto the lantern with Brunelleschi’s machines. His apprentice was Leonardo, who decades later sketched the burning mirrors used to solder its sections.

The Ming general Wu Sangui, holding the pass where the Great Wall meets the sea, joined the Manchu regent Dorgon against Li Zicheng. Their victory opened the road to Beijing; Dorgon entered it on 6 June, and the six-year-old Shunzhi Emperor was enthroned there that autumn. The conquest of the…

An excursion party from Batavia reached the island by steamer on Sunday morning and climbed, ankle-deep in pumice, to the rim of Perboewatan’s crater, some 900 metres across. Against the din a rifle shot sounded like “the popping of a champagne-cork amid the hubbub of a banquet”. A photographer on…

Russia’s Baltic Fleet sailed halfway round the world only to be destroyed in two days by Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō. Almost every Russian ship was sunk, captured or interned; Japan lost three torpedo boats.

The law let army commanders deport any population they judged a threat to security. It gave legal cover to deportations already under way and never named the Armenians.

George Finch and Geoffrey Bruce, breathing bottled oxygen, reached about 8,320 metres on the North Face before Bruce’s set failed. Tejbir Bura, a Gurkha lance-corporal who climbed with them, had turned back lower down. It was the new height record.

Mussolini’s World Cup. The holders Uruguay stayed away, repaying Europe’s snub of 1930, and so many teams entered that even the hosts had to qualify, the only time they ever have. Egypt became the first African team at a World Cup.

Governor Orval Faubus sent the Arkansas National Guard to keep nine Black students out of Central High School. Elizabeth Eckford, arriving alone, walked through a jeering mob. The nine were Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Pattillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence…

Heinrich Matthaei fed an artificial RNA made only of uracil to an extract of E. coli, and it made a protein made only of phenylalanine: the first word of the code. That August Nirenberg read it to a near-empty room at a congress in Moscow; Crick had him give it again to a packed hall.

Swiss police, acting for the United States, arrested seven FIFA officials at dawn in their hotel before FIFA’s congress. US prosecutors charged fourteen people over more than $150 million in bribes, and Switzerland opened its own case into the award of the 2018 and 2022 tournaments.