18. September

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus. — Gibbon Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus…

The Venetian government gave Johann of Speyer a five-year monopoly on printing in the city. He died within a year and the privilege lapsed, and by 1500 Venice had more presses than any other city in Europe.

The whole family went by Passau and Linz and down the Danube by boat. Within days the children were playing at court and in the palaces of the nobility. Late in October Wolfgang fell ill with a fever and a rash and was in bed for two weeks; in December they played in Pressburg, now Bratislava.

With Longstreet’s corps brought west by rail, Braxton Bragg broke the Union line through a gap opened by a mistaken order. George Thomas’s stand saved the army and made him the “Rock of Chickamauga”. 34,624 casualties (NPS).

The bank that had sold the Union’s Civil War bonds could not sell bonds for the Northern Pacific Railway, and closed its doors. Its failure set off the Panic of 1873 in the United States.

Seward leaves for London after the late telegram: “A whole night lost, and I know by bitter experience what may happen in a night.” He takes the phonograph cylinder with him.

Seward cannot make anyone hear at Hillingham until Van Helsing arrives, and they cut through three iron bars of the kitchen window with a surgical saw. They find four maids drugged with laudanum and Mrs. Westenra dead beside Lucy, who is still alive. Another transfusion is needed, and Quincey…

Mr. Hawkins has died suddenly, leaving Jonathan “a fortune”, and Mina, who “never knew either father or mother”, writes that “it really seems as though we had lost a father”. Jonathan, whose nerves have not recovered, will be chief mourner. This letter too is “Unopened by her.”

A reporter interviews the Zoo keeper Thomas Bilder after a wolf, Bersicker, has escaped and come back by himself, “his head all cut and full of broken glass”. Bilder has an explanation: “’ere wolf escaped—simply because he wanted to get out.”

Eight researchers walked out on William Shockley's lab and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild's alumni went on to start dozens of companies, Intel and AMD among them, and the valley got a new name: Silicon Valley.

The first living things to go around the Moon and come home: two Russian tortoises, with flies and mealworms, in a spacecraft built for two cosmonauts. They splashed down in the Indian Ocean three days later, thinner but alive.

The ruling party, an Opposition Round Table of eight groups and a third side of party-linked organisations negotiated the new constitution’s rules. The agreement set up free elections and a Constitutional Court; the Free Democrats and Fidesz refused to sign it.

Thursday evening, in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s conference room. Paulson and Bernanke told congressional leaders they needed hundreds of billions of dollars. By several accounts Bernanke warned that without it “we may not have an economy on Monday”.

VW diesels carried a “defeat device”: software that recognised an emissions test and cleaned up only then. On the road they gave off up to 40 times the permitted nitrogen oxides. About 11 million cars worldwide had the software, and the scandal pushed Volkswagen hard towards electric cars.

Japan’s Venus climate orbiter. Its main engine failed during the burn to enter orbit on 6 December 2010, and it sailed past into orbit around the Sun.