26. November

Thomas Telford and William Jessop carried the Ellesmere Canal 38 metres above the River Dee in a cast-iron trough on eighteen stone piers. It is still the highest navigable aqueduct in the world, and boats cross it daily.

On the Thames at Chelsea, William Ascroft drew the western sky in crayon six times, from just after sunset at 15:57 until the afterglow died at about 17:15. The six sketches became the coloured frontispiece of the Royal Society’s report.

Out of Lyttelton on 26 November and Port Chalmers on the 29th, overloaded with 19 ponies, 33 dogs and three motor sledges. A gale on 2 December nearly foundered her and killed two ponies; then the pack held her for nearly three weeks.

Chiang Kai-shek chose to fight in Shanghai, in view of the foreign concessions, and threw in his best German-trained divisions. They held for three months and were shattered: the core of China’s modern army was lost in the first autumn of the war.

For Savoy, Parker played a breakneck solo over the chords of the swing standard “Cherokee”, with Gillespie on trumpet and piano and the 19-year-old Miles Davis on other tunes that day. Every alto player of the next decade learned it.

France became the third country to launch its own satellite, on a Diamant rocket from Hammaguir in the Algerian Sahara, a base it kept for five years after Algerian independence.

G-BOAF, the last Concorde built, flew from Heathrow to Filton, where it had been made, making the last flight of any Concorde. It stands there today in the Aerospace Bristol museum.

A car-sized nuclear-powered rover sent to find out whether Gale Crater could once have supported life. It found an ancient lake bed with the chemistry life would need, and is still climbing Mount Sharp.