1 de abril

The ambassador’s wife, scarred by smallpox in 1715, described the Ottoman practice to her friend Sarah Chiswell: “The old woman comes with a nut-shell full of the matter of the best sort of small-pox, and asks what vein you please to have opened.” In March 1718 she had her young son engrafted at…

Darwin had worked out a theory of coral reefs in Chile, before he had seen one: an atoll is a reef that kept growing upward while the island it fringed slowly sank. Cocos was his one chance to test it on a real atoll. Drilling at Enewetak in 1952 bore him out.

Philip Sheridan overran George Pickett’s men at a crossroads guarding Lee’s last railroad. 3,780 casualties (NPS). Grant ordered an assault all along the line for the next morning.

Japan’s first showing at a world’s fair put prints, lacquer and ceramics in front of Paris. The craze that followed was named Japonisme by the critic Philippe Burty in the early 1870s. The flat colour, cropped views and high horizons of woodblock prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige turn up in Monet,…

Chief engineer and chairman of the commission, with the powers of a military governor. Every Sunday morning he heard complaints from any employee in person. In April 1914 he became the first Governor of the Panama Canal.

Stevens stopped the digging until the workers had housing, food and clean water, backed Gorgas, and treated the canal as a railway problem: the spoil could only go as fast as trains could carry it away. He argued Roosevelt and Congress into a lock canal.

A full chair at the German University. His window looked onto the gardens of an asylum: “those are the madmen who do not occupy themselves with quantum theory”. In June 1911 he worked out that starlight grazing the Sun should bend by 0.83 arcseconds, half the true figure, and asked astronomers to…

The last great battle of the war, on Japanese soil, and the costliest of the Pacific. Kamikazes sank or damaged hundreds of ships offshore. Estimates of Okinawan civilians killed run from about 40,000 to 150,000, many of them driven to suicide.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, to sell Wozniak's Apple I. Wayne sold back his 10% stake twelve days later for $800.

After a wave of mergers the East–West trades were shared among three alliances: 2M, Ocean Alliance and THE Alliance.