26. September

A raid on Spain's Pacific coast dressed up as a voyage of discovery. The Golden Hind came back to Plymouth so full of treasure that the Queen's share was larger than a year of her ordinary revenue.

Two weeks after beating Washington at Brandywine, Howe marched into the capital. Congress fled to Lancaster for a day and then to York, Pennsylvania.

Van Helsing comes back from Exeter, pushes the “Westminster Gazette” at Seward, and asks what he thinks of the children’s wounds. Seward says it is “like poor Lucy’s”. The professor lectures him on hypnotism, electricity and “corporeal transference”, and asks why Lucy, with “four men’s blood in…

Home again, Jonathan is told of Van Helsing’s visit and shown his letter: it “seems to have made a new man of me”. It was doubt that knocked him over, and now that he knows, he writes, “I am not afraid, even of the Count”, who has “got younger, and how?”

Max Planck, who advised the Annalen on theory, took it up at once and presented it to the Berlin physics colloquium that winter. His endorsement mattered more than any review: a clerk nobody had heard of now had the most respected theorist in Germany on his side.

The tug Gatun was raised through the three steps of the Atlantic locks to the lake, the first test of the whole machinery with a vessel.

The largest American battle of the war, with more than a million men committed. The cemetery at Romagne holds 14,246 American graves, the most of any American military cemetery in Europe.

The Indian boycott of foreign cloth had helped put Lancashire cotton workers out of work. He went to explain it to them in person, and the crowds in Darwen cheered him.

Britain’s Communal Award gave the Depressed Classes separate electorates of their own. Gandhi, in Yerwada again since January, held that this would split Hindu society for ever, and stopped eating until it was withdrawn.

Her car hit a truck on Highway 61 in Mississippi. John Hammond wrote in Down Beat that she bled to death after a white hospital turned her away. It was not true: she was taken to the Black hospital in Clarksdale and died there. Her grave in Pennsylvania had no headstone until 1970.

The first full-scale plutonium reactor started, then faded within hours. John Wheeler traced it to xenon-135, a fission product that swallows neutrons. DuPont had built in spare fuel channels, enough to overpower it.

The last album they recorded, closing with a 16-minute medley stitched from unfinished songs. Harrison’s “Something” became his first A-side, and Frank Sinatra sang it for years.

Shortly after midnight, Soviet early-warning satellites reported American missiles on the way. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the duty officer, judged it a false alarm and did not pass it up as an attack. The satellites had mistaken sunlight on clouds for launches.

Mandela and de Klerk agreed to an elected assembly that would write the final constitution, and the government agreed to fence the hostels and ban the carrying of “traditional weapons” in public. Inkatha, left out, walked away from the process.

Epic Games made the free last-player-standing mode in about two months, on top of a co-operative game that was selling poorly. In April 2020 12.3 million players attended a Travis Scott concert inside it; that August Epic’s own payment system got it thrown off Apple’s and Google’s stores and into…

The first test of planetary defence. The spacecraft rammed Dimorphos, the small moon of the asteroid Didymos, and cut its orbit by about 32 minutes, far more than the 73 seconds that would have counted as success.