28. Oktober

Constantine beat his rival Maxentius outside Rome, and Maxentius drowned in the Tiber. Constantine later told Eusebius he had seen a cross of light in the sky with the words “By this, conquer”; Lactantius says his soldiers painted a Christian sign on their shields.

Byzantine troops under Michael Bourtzes climbed the walls by night, and Antioch was Roman again after more than three centuries under Muslim rule. It stayed Byzantine until the Seljuks took it in 1084.

Michael Faraday turned a copper disc between the poles of the Royal Society’s great magnet and drew a steady electric current from its rim. Every power station since has turned a conductor in a magnetic field.

The telegram announcing the ship’s arrival at Galatz, not Varna, comes as no great shock to the party, who “all expected that something strange would happen”.

Folded into the World’s Fair and spread over five and a half months, with no opening ceremony; some winners never knew they had been at the Olympics. The athletics were run on the grass of the Racing Club de France in the Bois de Boulogne, round a track that sloped and dipped.

Castro heard of the deal on the radio, like everyone else, and was furious. He named his own terms: an end to the embargo, to subversion, to exile raids and to overflights, and the return of Guantánamo. He refused UN inspectors on Cuban soil.

Kennedy’s reply, sent at 20:05 and released to the press, accepted the terms of Friday’s letter and ignored Saturday’s. The Turkey offer travelled only by his brother’s word.

At the evening ExComm meeting Kennedy approved calling up 24 troop-carrier squadrons of the Air Force Reserve, the aircraft an invasion would need. Robert McNamara later said he wondered, walking out into the night, whether he would live to see another Saturday.

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…

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.

…the Soviet Government… has given a new order to dismantle the arms which you described as offensive, and to crate and return them to the Soviet Union. Too pressed to use the slow cable, Khrushchev had his answer read on Radio Moscow at 17:00 Moscow time, 09:00 in Washington, where the clocks had…

From the morning Kennedy saw the photographs to the morning Khrushchev said the missiles would go. Robert Kennedy’s memoir of it, Thirteen Days, gave the crisis its American name; in Cuba it is the October Crisis and in Russia the Caribbean Crisis.

The only British satellite ever put up by a British rocket, a Black Arrow fired from Woomera. The programme had already been cancelled when it flew.

Airbus A300 first flightAirbus A300

Europe’s answer to Boeing, from the same Toulouse airfield as Concorde: the first twin-engined wide-body. Airbus Industrie, founded by France and West Germany in 1970, went on to sell as many airliners as Boeing.

The Treasury paid 115 billion dollars for preferred shares in eight of the nine banks. Merrill Lynch’s share waited until Bank of America closed its purchase on 1 January.

Its deepest dive, about 49 km above the south pole, through jets of water spraying from the ocean under the moon’s ice.

The company renamed itself after the “metaverse” it said would succeed the mobile internet, and spent more than $10 billion a year on it. Facebook, the app, kept its name.