7. September

Marching south along the coast under constant attack, Richard’s army held formation until the Hospitallers charged. Saladin’s army was beaten but not destroyed, and the road to Jaffa was open.

The Yongle Emperor died on his last Mongol campaign. His son Zhu Gaochi, guided by Confucian ministers who hated waste and distrusted eunuchs, reigned less than a year.

On the day he took the throne, the Hongxi Emperor ordered that the treasure voyages stop and the ships at Taicang be called in. Zheng He was made commander of the Nanjing garrison, the old capital, the next year.

Meres’s Palladis Tamia names six comedies and six tragedies, including Loue labours wonne: the only proof that play existed. It is the main anchor for dating the early plays. As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among ye English is…

He went on foot from Whitehall to London Bridge and out to Moorfields, “clambering over heaps of yet smoking rubbish, and frequently mistaking where I was”. The ground was still too hot to walk on in places.

Van Helsing sees Lucy and says she will die “for sheer want of blood” without a transfusion at once. Arthur arrives by chance and offers “the last drop of blood in my body”: “My young sir, I do not ask so much as that—not the last!” Arthur gives the blood, and Lucy sleeps.

Philo Farnsworth, 21, transmitted a single straight line with no moving parts, using his image dissector tube. He said the idea came to him as a teenager, ploughing rows in an Idaho field — a picture scanned line by line. RCA fought him over the patents for a decade.

As Congress’s sole delegate he lodged at Kingsley Hall in the East End and took tea with George V in his dhoti. He claimed to speak for all India, untouchables included, and clashed with B. R. Ambedkar, who demanded separate electorates for them. The conference broke up without agreement.

Eight months of night bombing of London and of cities from Coventry to Belfast and Glasgow. London was bombed on 57 nights in a row at the start, and tens of thousands of Londoners slept in the Underground. More than 40,000 British civilians were killed.

Fred Vine and Drummond Matthews explained the mirror-image magnetic stripes either side of mid-ocean ridges: new crust records the field as it forms, and the field flips. The sea floor is a tape recorder of its own spreading, and continental drift had its engine.

General Omar Torrijos and President Jimmy Carter signed two treaties: one handing the canal to Panama at the end of 1999, and one keeping it permanently neutral. The U.S. Senate ratified both in 1978 by 68 votes to 32, one vote more than it needed.

Tens of thousands of ANC supporters marched on the capital of the Ciskei homeland to demand free political activity there. When some broke through a gap in the fence, Ciskei soldiers opened fire. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission records 28 marchers and a soldier killed.

On a Sunday morning Paulson and the new housing regulator, James Lockhart, took over the two companies that owned or guaranteed about half of all American mortgages, some 5 trillion dollars. The Treasury promised up to 100 billion dollars to each.

The first country to do so, alongside the US dollar: shops had to accept it, and the state handed out a wallet app with 30 dollars in it. Few used it, and in 2025, under a loan deal with the IMF, accepting bitcoin was made voluntary.