10. Oktober

Cassius Dio lists among the portents of the year Marcus Agrippa died “the star called the comet”, which stood for several days over the city and at last broke up into what looked like torches. It is too early for the Star of Bethlehem on most datings of Jesus’ birth.

Cardinal Luigi d’Aragona called at Cloux. His secretary Antonio de Beatis saw three pictures, among them a Florentine lady painted for Giuliano de’ Medici, and notebooks on anatomy “such as has never yet been done”. He noted that a paralysis of the right hand kept Leonardo from painting, though he…

Those Indians wer much astonished at my Servent, They never Saw a black man before, all flocked around him & examind. him from top to toe — Clark York was Clark’s slave, owned by him since both were boys, and the only Black member of the party. He hunted, scouted and nursed the sick like any of…

His last book, on how earthworms turn over the soil and slowly bury stones and ruins. Worms ignored a shrill whistle, a bassoon and a piano played as loudly as possible; they were deaf. But set in their pots on the piano itself, they fled into their burrows at a single low C.

On his deathbed Hermann Einstein at last consented to the marriage to Mileva, then asked everyone to leave the room so that he could die alone. His son remembered it as one of the deepest shocks of his life.

A bomb went off by accident in a revolutionary workshop in Hankou the day before, and police seized the members’ lists. With nothing left to lose, New Army units in Wuchang rose. Within two months most provinces had broken with the Qing, and on 1 January 1912 Sun Yat-sen took office in Nanjing as…

Thirteen kilometres through the continental divide, from Gamboa to Pedro Miguel. At the peak some 6,000 men, dozens of steam shovels and hundreds of spoil trains a day worked in the Cut. The hills kept slumping into it: slides added roughly almost a third to the earth that had to be taken out.

President Woodrow Wilson pressed a key in the White House, and the signal went by telegraph and cable to Panama and set off the charges in the dike that held Gatun Lake out of the Cut. The lake poured into the Culebra Cut.

Lenin came back in secret, in a wig and without his beard, to a flat on the Karpovka whose owner, the Menshevik Sukhanov, was away. After a night’s argument the Central Committee voted 10 to 2 to put an armed uprising “on the order of the day”. Kamenev and Zinoviev voted against.

The first geostationary satellite, fixed in the sky above the Pacific, carried the opening ceremony live across the Pacific to a ground station in California.

The first Games in Asia, broadcast live to the United States by satellite. The last torchbearer, Yoshinori Sakai, was born in Hiroshima Prefecture on 6 August 1945, the day the bomb fell.

After six years of talks, Volkswagen signed a joint venture with the Shanghai Tractor and Automobile Corporation in the Great Hall of the People. Its Santana, built at Anting from 1985, became the car of China’s taxi fleets and officials.

Eight straight days of losses ended the week 18 per cent down. The G7 finance ministers, meeting in Washington that day, promised to let no important bank fail.

The US Anti-Doping Agency set out its case against Armstrong and his US Postal team: sworn testimony from 26 people, including 15 riders, with payments, emails and blood data.