5 de enero

He died childless at Westminster on the eve of Twelfth Night, a week after the consecration of the abbey he had rebuilt, which he was too ill to attend. The English sources say he entrusted the kingdom to Harold on his deathbed; the Normans said he had promised it to Duke William years before. The…

Zurich sentenced the Anabaptist leader to death by drowning, a mocking echo of the baptism he preached. Bound hand and knee, he was thrown into the river: the first Anabaptist put to death by a Protestant government. A plaque on the riverbank has marked the spot since 2004.

The whole family went by Passau and Linz and down the Danube by boat. Within days the children were playing at court and in the palaces of the nobility. Late in October Wolfgang fell ill with a fever and a rash and was in bed for two weeks; in December they played in Pressburg, now Bratislava.

The family came to Vienna for the wedding of the Archduchess Maria Josepha, who died of smallpox instead. They fled the epidemic to Olmütz in Moravia, where both children caught it anyway and were nursed in the cathedral deanery. Back in Vienna the Emperor Joseph II suggested an opera, but La…

“A new invented method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire engines.” The engine used about a quarter of the coal of a Newcomen engine, but it took Watt six more years, and a new partner, to build one that worked.

The line was so dull that workers quit in droves, so Ford roughly doubled pay to five dollars for an eight-hour day for workers who qualified. Thousands of job-seekers crowded the gates at Highland Park, and Ford’s Sociological Department inspected workers’ homes and habits before paying the full…

On a new expedition in the Quest, Shackleton died of a heart attack in his cabin in King Edward Cove, aged 47. Macklin, the ship’s doctor, was with him. Worsley, Wild and McIlroy were among the Endurance men aboard.

Alexander Dubček, the new party leader, promised “socialism with a human face”: censorship all but ended, and Czechs and Slovaks began to say what they thought. Moscow watched with growing alarm.