28 de diciembre

It took home the envoys of nineteen countries and went further than ever. Squadrons reached Aden and the Swahili coast, and the fleet came home with lions, leopards, zebras, ostriches and giraffes for the imperial menagerie.

At the law students’ Christmas revels, too many guests crowded the hall, the planned entertainment was abandoned, and the players filled in: a Comedy of Errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the Players. So that Night was begun, and continued to the end, in nothing but Confusion and…

With the landlord away for Christmas, the Burbages, their carpenter Peter Street and a dozen workmen took the Theatre apart and carried its timbers off. They became the frame of the Globe. The landlord sued, and lost.

A few men camped on the beach fifteen miles south of the fort and boiled seawater in kettles day and night, making salt for the journey home. The stone cairn of their furnace is still there.

Ten short films, about twenty minutes in all, projected in the basement Salon Indien of a café for one franc a head. The usual figure is 33 paying spectators that first night; within weeks there were queues down the boulevard. The famous train pulling into La Ciotat station, said to have sent…

Röntgen handed his preliminary report to the Würzburg Physical-Medical Society and called the rays X “for the sake of brevity”. Six days earlier he had photographed his wife Anna Bertha’s hand, bones and wedding ring. By January the pictures were in newspapers worldwide. He took no patent, and in…

Robert Williams spent his director’s discretionary time pointing Hubble for ten days at a patch of Ursa Major that looked empty, about the size of a tennis ball seen from 100 metres. It held some 3,000 galaxies, some seen as they were more than ten billion years ago.