14 de abril

An Easter rising in Barbados, named after Bussa, an African-born head ranger. It spread over a third of the island before troops and militia put it down. One white civilian and one soldier died. Governor Leith reported 144 rebels executed; counts of those killed in the fighting vary widely.

At 4:30 in the morning Confederate batteries opened on the federal fort in Charleston harbour. After 34 hours Major Robert Anderson surrendered, and no one had been killed. A private died on the 14th when a gun blew up during the salute to the flag.

John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in his box at Ford’s Theatre during a comedy, Our American Cousin. He died at 7:22 the next morning in a boarding house across the street. A fellow conspirator stabbed Secretary of State William Seward the same night; Seward survived.

John Wilkes Booth shot him during a play five days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Lincoln died at 7:22 the next morning in the Petersen House across the street, the first president assassinated.

Ten of Edison’s peep-show cabinets in a row on Broadway. You bent over an eyepiece and watched a strip of film under a minute long, alone: 25 cents bought a row of five machines. Moving pictures were a one-viewer-at-a-time novelty for nearly two years.

“Westbound steamers report bergs, growlers and field ice in 42° N, from 49° to 51° W.” Captain Edward Smith acknowledged it and posted it on the bridge.

A clear, calm Sunday on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Warnings of ice ahead came in all day, and she held her speed of about 22 knots, close to her best.

Baltic passed on a Greek steamer's report of icebergs and field ice. Smith handed it to Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line, who showed it to passengers and kept it until Smith asked for it back at 19:15.

“Two large icebergs in 41°27′ N, 50°8′ W.” It was addressed to the Hydrographic Office in Washington, and Titanic's operators only relayed it; no officer ever saw it.

At “the Corner”, where westbound liners on the southern track turned for New York, she came onto her last course. It led straight toward the ice the warnings had described.

Sent to another ship and overheard: “Three large bergs five miles to southward of us.” Junior operator Harold Bride took it to the bridge.

Protons from John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton’s voltage multiplier broke lithium nuclei into pairs of alpha particles; Walton saw the flashes first. It was the first nucleus split by a machine, and the energy released matched the mass lost. Nature printed it on 30 April.

And this is the crew of Apollo 13 wishing everybody there a nice evening, and we’re just about ready to close out our inspection of Aquarius and get back for a pleasant evening in Odyssey. Good night. — Lovell A half-hour tour of the lunar module. None of the networks carried it live. It ended at…

Houston, we’ve had a problem. The crew rode the lunar module Aquarius around the Moon as a lifeboat and splashed down safely four days later.

From the bang to Lovell’s report that Odyssey was completely powered down: under three hours in which the crew went from a Moon landing to a fight to stay alive. Gene Kranz’s White Team had the control room when it began; Glynn Lunney’s team took over.

Ninety seconds after Swigert switched on the tank’s stirring fans, as Houston had asked, bare wires inside it shorted and lit the Teflon insulation. The tank burst at GET 55:54:53 and blew a whole panel off the service module. The damage had been done on the ground: while the tank was emptied at…

We’re bored to tears down here. — Joe Kerwin, Houston, nine hours before the explosion Two days in which the flight went as smoothly as any before it. Transcript: Apollo 13 Flight Journal

Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here. — Swigert This is Houston. Say again, please. — Jack Lousma Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem. We’ve had a Main B Bus Undervolt. — Lovell The 1995 film turned it into “Houston, we have a problem”, and that is how most people quote it. Transcript: Apollo 13…

…it looks to me, looking out the hatch, that we are venting something. — Lovell A cloud of gas was streaming from the service module: the second oxygen tank was leaking too, and with it went the fuel cells that made the ship’s power. There would be no landing. Transcript: Apollo 13 Flight Journal

And, Jack, I got LM power on. — Haise Built to keep two men alive for two days, the lunar module kept three alive for nearly four. Power and water were rationed, the temperature fell to about 3 °C, and Haise came home with an infection that kept him down for three weeks.

Nobody trusted the service module engine next to the blast, so the lunar module’s descent engine pushed the whole docked stack for 34 seconds and put it back on a path that would loop around the Moon and fall back to Earth.

After 36 orbits and 2 days 6 hours 20 minutes 53 seconds. Television had shown heat-shield tiles missing from the engine pods at the tail. None came from the belly, and Columbia came home intact to a crowd of hundreds of thousands.

Afghanistan and Pakistan signed, with the United States and the Soviet Union as guarantors, and Soviet troops began to leave in May. The accords did not end the fighting among Afghans.

Eleven days before the double helix turned 50: 99% of the gene-containing sequence, 99.99% accurate. The last, most repetitive 8% of the genome was only read in 2022.

Europe’s JUpiter ICy moons Explorer, due at Jupiter in 2031 and then to become the first spacecraft to orbit a moon of another planet: Ganymede.