5. September

Sparks from a fire in the town lodged under the roof lead, and the monks’ choir burned out. The monk Gervase watched it and then wrote down the rebuilding year by year, the most detailed eyewitness account of a medieval building site.

On Wednesday night a glow over Fleet Street started a rumour that 50,000 French and Dutch had risen and were marching on Moorfields. The homeless poured into the streets and attacked any foreigner they met until soldiers and courtiers pushed them back. The glow was the fire flaring up at the Temple.

He crossed the ruins to Moorfields, “our feet ready to burn, walking through the towne among the hot coles”. He kept a piece of glass from the Mercers’ chapel, melted and buckled like parchment, and saw a cat pulled from a chimney by the Exchange, its hair burned off, still alive. Diary entry: 5…

The north-western edge of the fire. A gilded boy on the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane marks the spot; his inscription blames the fire on the sin of gluttony, since it began at Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner.

The western edge. A flare-up on Wednesday night burned much of the Inner Temple, even after Paper House was blown up to stop it, but the round Temple Church survived.

With the gale gone, the firebreaks held. The fire was stopped at Pie Corner in the north-west, at the Temple in the west and at All Hallows in the east, though it still burned inside the ruins.

Woken by cries that the fire had reached Barking church at the bottom of his lane, Pepys took his wife, his clerk Will Hewer, Jane and about £2,350 in gold downriver by boat. Lord! what sad sight it was by moone-light to see, the whole City almost on fire, that you might see it plain at Woolwich,…

Back by seven, Pepys found houses blown up and the fire stopped at All Hallows, which lost only its dial and part of its porch. He climbed the steeple. There saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. Diary…

The Comte de Grasse’s French fleet fought the Royal Navy to a draw off the Virginia Capes. The British ships went back to New York, and Cornwallis was cut off from rescue by sea.

About 140 chemists met to agree on atomic weights and failed. But Stanislao Cannizzaro's pamphlet, handed out at the end, used Avogadro's hypothesis to give one consistent set. Lothar Meyer said the scales fell from his eyes; Mendeleev, aged 26, was in the hall.

In Honolulu Sereno Bishop described a whitish corona round the Sun, reaching 20 to 30 degrees from it, tinged pink and shading to lilac. It was seen wherever the haze went, and a halo of this kind is still called Bishop’s ring.

The next day’s wire reports the colour coming back, and good appetite and sleep: “Patient greatly improved.”

Japan opened the war over Korea and Manchuria with a torpedo attack on Port Arthur two days before it declared war. It was the first great victory of an Asian power over a European one in modern times.

Mediated by Theodore Roosevelt, it gave Japan southern Sakhalin, the Liaodong lease and a free hand in Korea, but no indemnity. Crowds in Tokyo who had expected one rioted in Hibiya Park the same day.

Joffre’s French armies and the British turned on the German right wing east of Paris and forced it back to the Aisne. Paris taxis ferried a few thousand reinforcements to the front. The Schlieffen Plan had failed: there would be no quick victory in the west.

Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Family Law Act this day; in force from 1 January 1970. “Irreconcilable differences” replaced proof of adultery, cruelty or desertion, the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. New York, in 2010, was the last state to follow.

Before dawn eight members of the Palestinian group Black September broke into the Israeli team’s apartments at Connollystraße 31. They killed the wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and the weightlifter Yossef Romano and held nine hostages through the day, demanding the release of prisoners in Israel.

Faster than its twin, and now the most distant human-made object. Both carry a gold-plated record chosen by a committee under Carl Sagan: pictures, music and greetings in 55 languages, for anyone who finds it.

Eight years, one month and nine days.

Nearly six years. Morceli won the Olympic 1500 metres in Atlanta in 1996.

The Algerian took nearly two seconds off Cram’s record on a small-town Italian track famous for fast times.

The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act received assent this day; in force from 9 September. Daughters were now born with the same share of joint family property as sons. In 2020 the Supreme Court ruled that this held whether or not the father was alive in 2005.

The WHO, the IAEA and six other UN bodies, with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, projected up to about 4,000 eventual deaths among the 600,000 most exposed. Wider estimates followed in 2006: about 16,000 across Europe (IARC) and 30,000 to 60,000 (TORCH). UNSCEAR counts more than 6,000 thyroid cancers…

Friends’ updates arrived on one page instead of on each profile, and users revolted: hundreds of thousands joined protest groups. Zuckerberg replied in a post titled “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.” The feed stayed, and became how every social network works.