15 de enero

Refused leave, Wolfgang resigned, and Colloredo dismissed him. He set off to find a post with his mother as chaperone: Munich, Augsburg, four months in Mannheim, six in Paris. Nobody hired him, his mother died, and he came home to Salzburg sixteen months later with nothing but new music and debts.

William’s son shipped a twenty-foot reflector to Cape Town to extend his father’s survey to the southern sky. In four years at Feldhausen he catalogued some 1,700 nebulae and clusters and over 2,000 double stars, and watched Halley’s Comet come back in 1835.

Bombarding aluminium with alpha particles from polonium, her daughter and son-in-law made a radioactive isotope of phosphorus: the first artificial radioactivity. Frédéric remembered the joy on Marie’s face when they showed her the tube. It won them the Nobel Prize the year after her death.

Bombarding aluminium with alpha particles, Irène Joliot-Curie and Frédéric Joliot found it kept emitting after the source was taken away: they had made radioactive phosphorus, the first artificial radioisotope. The 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to both; she was its second woman laureate,…

Messiaen wrote it as a prisoner of war, for himself and three fellow prisoners: piano, clarinet, violin and cello. They played it in the camp’s theatre hut to prisoners and guards in the January cold. Messiaen later spoke of 5,000 listeners; the players remembered a few hundred.

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger started it as a side project to feed the slow, expert-reviewed Nupedia, which it outgrew within a year. Anyone could edit any page; millions of articles later, they still can.

Its capsule, the fastest human-made object ever to enter Earth’s atmosphere, brought home grains of comet Wild 2 caught in aerogel. In 2009 scientists found the amino acid glycine among them.

When US Airways Flight 1549 ditched in the Hudson River, Janis Krums, on a ferry heading to the rescue, posted a phone photo: “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.” It went round the world before television had pictures.

Maersk moved its first regular service back through the Red Sea after two years of sailing round the Cape. Others followed, one service at a time.