1. Oktober

On ground Darius had levelled for his 200 scythed chariots. Arrian gives Alexander 7,000 cavalry and 40,000 infantry, and Darius a million; modern estimates of the Persian army run from about 50,000 to 100,000. The Babylonian diary says his troops deserted him and fled.

Philip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the Protestants against the emperor. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and split on the fifteenth: whether Christ’s body is really present in the bread. Luther chalked “Hoc est corpus meum” on the table.

Two regiments came ashore at Long Wharf to back up the customs commissioners. For a town of about 15,000, a garrison in the streets was a daily provocation.

Van Helsing goes alone to see Renfield and is told: “You are the old fool Van Helsing…Damn all thick-headed Dutchmen!” Back in the study he and Seward agree that Mina should be kept out of the hunt: “Mrs. Harker is better out of it.”

Renfield, now a man “commanding destiny”, tells Seward he wants no souls: “Life is all I want. … You must get a new patient, doctor, if you wish to study zoöphagy!” When Van Helsing and Seward visit later, he is singing gaily and has spread out his sugar for the flies again.

Jonathan finds Thomas Snelling at Bethnal Green too drunk to remember anything, and the mate Joseph Smollet at Walworth, whose dog-eared notebook shows six boxes left at 197, Chicksand Street, Mile End New Town, and six at Jamaica Lane, Bermondsey. Smollet has also heard a Sam Bloxam say he had “a…

They all oversleep. By now the party knows of twenty-one boxes having been removed, and Jonathan plans to look up Thomas Snelling, one of the carriers who took boxes away from Carfax, to trace where they went.

Lord Godalming’s solicitors report on the sale of No. 347, Piccadilly: the buyer is “a foreign nobleman, Count de Ville”, who paid the purchase money in notes “over the counter”. The vendors were the executors of the late Mr. Archibald Winter-Suffield. “Beyond this we know nothing whatever of him.”

Mina writes: “It is strange to me to be kept in the dark as I am to-day.” Jonathan, after “full confidence for so many years”, will not tell her what happened at Carfax, and she suspects the men have agreed to say nothing of the “most vital” matters.

Just as they are leaving for Carfax, Renfield sends an urgent message, and the party goes to him. Calm and eloquent, he asks to be released at once: “I desire to go at once—here—now—this very hour—this very moment, if I may. Time presses.” Seward, remembering his sudden changes, will not.

The five men enter Carfax. Van Helsing gives each a piece of the Sacred Wafer, and in the old chapel they count the boxes: “only twenty-nine left out of the fifty”. Rats swarm out of the earth until Arthur’s three terriers, whistled up from behind Seward’s house, drive them off.

Built first at the Piquette Avenue Plant, the Model T had a 20-horsepower four-cylinder engine, a two-speed planetary gearbox worked by pedals, and parts of light, strong vanadium steel. The touring car cost $850.

Ford built more than 15 million Model Ts, high enough for rutted farm roads and simple enough to mend with basic tools. As output rose the price fell, from $850 in 1908 to under $300 by the mid-1920s. Ford wrote that a customer could have it “painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”.

Australian Light Horse and Arab forces entered the city the same day, and the Arab flag was raised over it. Faisal’s claim to rule it collided with the Sykes–Picot map, which had given Syria to France.

Sharif Hussein of Mecca rose against the Ottomans on a British promise of Arab independence. His son Faisal’s army, with the British liaison officer T. E. Lawrence, raided the Hejaz railway and moved north beside Allenby’s advance.

The Cortes voted 161 to 121 for women’s suffrage after Campoamor, one of three women deputies, argued against Victoria Kent, another, who feared women would vote as their priests told them. Women first voted in 1933.

Sworn in at the federal court in Trenton with Margot and Helen Dukas. He kept his Swiss passport as well, and a habit of saying exactly what he thought about his new country’s racial segregation.

From the rostrum of Tiananmen, Mao Zedong declared the People’s Republic of China. With the world’s most populous country now communist, Washington argued for years over “who lost China”.

The night before, a mob fought the federal marshals guarding him around the Lyceum. Two men were killed, the French journalist Paul Guihard and a local man, Ray Gunter, and scores of marshals were hurt before soldiers restored order. Meredith registered that morning and graduated in August 1963.

Nine days before the Tokyo Olympics, the first high-speed line opened between Tokyo and Shin-Ōsaka, on its own standard-gauge track with no level crossings. Trains ran at up to 210 kilometres an hour and made the trip in four hours, soon three hours ten.

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s decree banned abortion, then the country’s main form of birth control, except for women over 45, mothers of four or more, and on medical grounds. Births nearly doubled in 1967 and then fell as illegal abortion spread. Kligman counts about 9,500 women dead of abortion by 1989.…

A strip of American territory cutting Panama in two, with its own governor, police, courts and schools. Resentment of it grew into riots in January 1964, and the zone was abolished under the 1977 treaties.

The Nordic telephone administrations built one shared standard, so a phone worked in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland alike: the first international roaming. It gave Ericsson and Nokia a head start they kept for twenty years.

Sony’s CDP-101 player launched in Japan with a small catalogue from CBS/Sony. Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, catalogue number 35DP-1, is counted as the first CD released. Europe and the United States followed in early 1983.

While the sarcophagus was still being built next door, the plant's first reactor restarted. Chernobyl kept making electricity until December 2000.

Air bubbles in a core drilled by the Soviet team at Vostok, analysed with French glaciologists, gave 160,000 years of CO₂: about 190–200 ppm in the last ice age, 260–280 ppm in the warm spells, rising and falling with temperature through a full glacial cycle.

An international public project, led by the NIH and the Department of Energy with the Sanger Centre in Britain and labs in France, Germany, Japan and China, to read all 3 billion letters of human DNA. Budgeted at 3 billion dollars, it finished early and under budget.

North and South Korea marched in together under one flag. The Games are often called the best run of the modern era, a title the IOC’s president gave them at the close: “the best Olympic Games ever”.

Sweetened with tax breaks and a rise in deposit insurance from 100,000 to 250,000 dollars an account, the three-page draft had grown to more than 450 pages.