27. Oktober

The Spanish physician who denied the Trinity had escaped the Catholic Inquisition in France, only to be recognised in Geneva, tried and burned at Champel. Calvin had asked for a quicker death by the sword and been refused. Geneva’s Calvinists raised an “expiatory monument” on the spot in 1903.

Johannes Kepler, imperial mathematician in Prague, followed it from late September. Sure that comets travelled in straight lines, he never imagined it would come back, though he had just shown that planets move in ellipses.

A French watchmaker’s son, Hubert confessed to throwing a fireball through the bakery window, and was convicted on his own word. Evidence heard later showed he had not reached London until two days after the fire began. Few who condemned him believed him.

Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote 85 essays as “Publius” to win over New York. They are now read as the best guide to what the framers meant.

Mina’s reports have been “lapping waves and rushing water”, though the waves are “very faint”. Van Helsing fears the Count is escaping: “I did not like that lethargy of Madam Mina’s.”

The Nestor Company rented the Blondeau Tavern at Sunset and Gower. It came for sunshine, cheap land and every kind of scenery within a day’s drive — and, the story goes, distance from Edison’s patent lawyers. Within a few years most American films were made in and around Los Angeles.

It is hard to write what I feel. To a sailor his ship is more than a floating home. — Shackleton At 69°05′ S 51°30′ W the crew moved their gear onto the ice, into what became Dump Camp. They were 346 miles from Paulet Island, the nearest place with a hut and stores.

The ship went where the pack went: south-west at first, then north and west round the bight of the Weddell Sea. In 281 days she was carried 573 miles in a straight line and 1,186 miles through Worsley’s observed positions.

Moscow fell after a week of street fighting between the Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee and the city duma’s Committee of Public Safety, whose officer cadets held the Kremlin for a time. Red artillery shelled it. The dead on both sides numbered several hundred; no reliable count exists.

The Council of People’s Commissars, at first all Bolshevik: Lenin in the chair, Trotsky at foreign affairs, Stalin at nationalities. Left SRs joined in December. It ruled from the Smolny until it moved to Moscow in March 1918.

Hendrik Lorentz and Paul Ehrenfest got him a special chair he held for a few weeks a year. In “Ether and the Theory of Relativity” he argued that the space of general relativity has physical properties, and so is in a sense an ether after all. He stayed with Ehrenfest, whose guests signed the wall…

A row over whether East German guards could check American officials’ papers ended with American and Soviet tanks facing each other across Friedrichstraße, about a hundred metres apart, for sixteen hours. Kennedy and Khrushchev quietly agreed to pull back one at a time.

Saturday 27 October, the day on which, most historians agree, the world came closest to nuclear war: a harder letter from Moscow, an American pilot killed over Cuba, another U-2 lost over Siberia and a Soviet submarine cornered in the Atlantic, all within about twelve hours.

Convinced an invasion was hours away, Castro spent the night at the Soviet embassy in Havana dictating a letter to Khrushchev. If the Americans invaded, it said, the Soviet Union should strike them first with nuclear weapons. He had already ordered his gunners to fire at low-flying American planes.

You are disturbed over Cuba. You say that this disturbs you because it is 90 miles by sea from the coast of the United States of America. But Turkey adjoins us; our sentries patrol back and forth and see each other. At about 09:00 Washington time (16:00 in Moscow) Radio Moscow began reading a new…

Two S-75 surface-to-air missiles brought down the U-2 of Major Rudolf Anderson Jr. over eastern Cuba at about 10:20 Cuban time (11:20 in Washington). He was killed. The order to fire was given by Soviet generals on the island without Moscow’s approval. Anderson, 35, was the only person killed by…

On an air-sampling flight from Alaska towards the North Pole, Captain Charles Maultsby lost his bearings in the aurora and crossed into Soviet airspace over Chukotka at 11:59 Washington time. MiGs rose from Pevek and Anadyr, and American F-102s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles flew out to…

Through the afternoon Kennedy’s advisers mostly opposed trading away the Jupiters, fearing it would split NATO. Kennedy thought most people would see it as a fair trade and wanted room to make it. News of Anderson’s death reached the room that evening; Kennedy held back the reprisal the Chiefs…

American destroyers hunting the Soviet submarine B-59 dropped practice depth charges to force her up. She carried a nuclear torpedo, and her batteries were nearly flat and the air inside foul. A signals officer later wrote that Captain Valentin Savitsky ordered it readied; accounts published…

At about 19:45 Robert Kennedy promised no invasion if the missiles went, and told Dobrynin privately that the Jupiters would be out of Turkey within four to five months, so long as Moscow never called it part of a deal. The secret held for more than twenty years.

The first Games in Latin America, at 2,240 metres. Enriqueta Basilio became the first woman to light the cauldron, and Dick Fosbury won the high jump going over backwards.

It reached Mars in a planet-wide dust storm and waited it out. When the dust settled it mapped most of the planet, found the giant volcanoes and the canyon system now named Valles Marineris after it, and sent back 7,329 pictures.

He walked into headquarters the day before carrying a sink, closed the deal, and fired the chief executive that evening. About half the staff were laid off a week later.