24 de octubre

At Misenum, 30 kilometres across the bay, “hora fere septima”, about the seventh hour, Pliny’s mother pointed out a cloud of unusual size and shape to her brother, Pliny the Elder. He had been lying in the sun, taken a cold bath and lunched, and was working. No tree conveys its likeness and shape…

For many days before there had been tremors of the earth, less frightening because they are usual in Campania. — Pliny, Letters 6.20 Pliny gives no number of days, so the band starts loosely in October. Nobody at the time connected the shaking with Vesuvius, which had been quiet for centuries and…

When Vesuvius erupted, Pompeii was still a building site: the Central Baths were unfinished and several temples still under repair. The Temple of Isis had been rebuilt “from its foundations” in the name of Numerius Popidius Celsinus, aged six, which bought the boy a seat on the town council. Some…

About nineteen hours from the first column to the surge that reached Stabiae. Vesuvius threw out some 4 cubic kilometres of pumice and ash, a VEI 5 eruption. Volcanologists call this kind “Plinian”, after Pliny the Younger’s description. About 1,150 bodies have been recovered at Pompeii, with a…

Ash fell on the ships, hotter and thicker the closer they came, then pumice and blackened stones. A sudden shoal and debris from the mountain blocked the shore. Pliny gives no hours for the crossing, some 30 kilometres under oar; the band is an estimate.

The wind carried the column south-east, over Pompeii, 10 kilometres from the vent. Pumice fell on the town at some 15 centimetres an hour, about 2.8 metres of it by morning, and roofs gave way under the weight. Of the 1,044 victims Luongo and colleagues could place in the deposits, 394 lay in this…

Pliny the Elder was admiral of the fleet at Misenum. He called for a light ship to go and look, and offered his nephew a place; the nephew said he would rather study. As the admiral left the house, a note came from Rectina, whose villa lay at the foot of the mountain, with no escape but by sea. He…

The helmsman urged him to turn back. Pliny answered “Fortes fortuna iuvat: Pomponianum pete”, fortune favours the brave, head for Pomponianus, a friend at Stabiae. The wind that carried him there kept Pomponianus from leaving. The hour is an estimate. Latin text: Pliny, Letters 6.16

Pliny the Younger studied, bathed, dined and slept badly. That night the tremors grew so strong that everything seemed not just to shake but to overturn. He and his mother sat in the forecourt, and he called for a volume of Livy and went on making notes from it, “whether from courage or…

To calm the household, Pliny bathed and dined cheerfully, or pretended to, told them the fires on the mountain were empty farmhouses, and went to sleep: he was a heavy man, and his snoring could be heard from the door. The courtyard filled with ash and pumice until they woke him before he was shut…

The pumice changed from white to grey as deeper, hotter magma came up, and the column rose to its greatest height, about 32 kilometres. The layer boundary runs through every excavated house in Pompeii. The hour is Sigurdsson’s estimate.

Shortly after midnight the column began to collapse. Its fall fed avalanches of gas, ash and rock that raced down the slopes faster than anyone could run. Sigurdsson counts six surges, S1 to S6, each reaching farther than the last. Of the victims placed in Pompeii’s deposits, 650 died in the…

A fleet of English, Flemish and Rhineland crusaders sailing for the East stopped to help Afonso Henriques of Portugal besiege Lisbon. After seventeen weeks the city surrendered: the Second Crusade’s one lasting conquest, in the Iberian war the popes now counted as crusading too.

Some forty years after the roof went on, the rebuilt cathedral was dedicated in the presence of Louis IX. Consecration often lagged the building by decades: it waited for money, a bishop and, ideally, a king.

Eleven days after a banquet at which, Kepler wrote, he would not leave the table to relieve himself. Tests on his exhumed remains in 2010 ruled out the mercury poisoning long suspected. His observations passed to Kepler.

The emperor signed peace with France, negotiated at Münster, and with Sweden, negotiated at Osnabrück. The treaties recognised Calvinism alongside Lutheranism and Catholicism and fixed each territory’s churches as they stood in 1624. Pope Innocent X condemned them as null and void. In Protestant…

From the Defenestration of Prague to the Peace of Westphalia, fought mostly in the German lands. Kepler’s printing of the Rudolphine Tables was held up by it, and the young Descartes served in its early campaigns.

A Bohemian revolt that drew in Denmark, Sweden, Spain and Catholic France, which fought on the Protestant side from 1635. Peter Wilson estimates that the Empire lost about 5 million people, some 20 per cent of its population, to fighting, hunger and disease.

The last visit, for the second Milan carnival opera. Leopold stretched the stay by pleading rheumatism while he chased a post in Florence. None came, and Wolfgang never went back to Italy.

Western Union’s lines from east and west met at Salt Lake City, and California’s chief justice wired Abraham Lincoln to pledge the state’s loyalty to the Union. The Pony Express, barely eighteen months old, announced its end two days later.

A whole week of waiting. Daily telegrams to Godalming all say “Not yet reported”, and Mina’s hypnotic answer morning and evening is unchanged: lapping waves, rushing water and creaking masts.

Lloyd’s at last has news for Lord Godalming at Varna: “Czarina Catherine reported this morning from Dardanelles.”

Two motor sledges left Cape Evans with Teddy Evans, Lashly, Day and Hooper to haul stores ahead of the ponies. Both broke down within about a week, and their crews man-hauled on.

Pressure twisted the stern and tore out the sternpost; water poured in. For three days the men pumped in shifts and McNish, the carpenter, built a cofferdam in the engine room, but the ice did not let go.

German and Austro-Hungarian troops, using gas and infiltration tactics, broke through on the upper Isonzo. A young Erwin Rommel took Monte Matajur. Italy lost more than a quarter of a million prisoners and fell back more than 100 kilometres to the Piave, where the line held.

At about 05:30 local time officer cadets seized the print shop of the Bolshevik paper Rabochii Put’. Kerensky’s move let the Bolsheviks cast their rising as defence of the Soviet. By late morning the Military Revolutionary Committee had the paper printing again.

About 48 hours from the government’s raid on the Bolshevik press to the Congress of Soviets taking power. There was little fighting: trams ran and theatres played while the Military Revolutionary Committee took over the city one building at a time. It ran from 6 to 8 November in the West.

Against orders, Lenin left his hiding place late in the evening with his bodyguard Eino Rahja, face bandaged and in a wig, and reached the Soviet’s headquarters near midnight to push the rising on.

From about 02:00 local time, sailors, soldiers and Red Guards occupied the railway stations, the bridges over the Neva, the power station and the telegraph, and by morning the State Bank and the telephone exchange, mostly without a shot.

A year to the day after Caporetto, Italian, British and French troops crossed the Piave. The Habsburg army, its nations already breaking away, fell apart, and Austria-Hungary signed an armistice at Villa Giusti on 3 November.

A record 12.9 million shares changed hands. At midday bankers pooled money to buy, and Richard Whitney of the exchange walked the floor bidding 205 for U.S. Steel. The market closed only 2 per cent down.

An R-16 missile, fuelled and swarming with technicians racing a deadline, fired its second stage on the pad. At least 78 people died, among them Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, head of the Strategic Rocket Forces. The designer Mikhail Yangel lived because he had stepped away to smoke. Moscow blamed a…

Khrushchev’s reply called the quarantine “an act of aggression which pushes mankind toward the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war”, and said Soviet captains would not obey it.

Late that evening the Attorney General called on Anatoly Dobrynin and accused Moscow of lying about the missiles. Asked whether Soviet ships would stop at the line, Dobrynin said their captains’ orders were to sail on. It began the back channel that would end the crisis.

Named after a river in the Soviet Far East so that even the troops would think they were going somewhere cold (some were issued skis and winter coats), Anadyr planned 24 R-12 and 16 R-14 launchers, surface-to-air missile batteries, Il-28 bombers, cruise missiles and about 50,000 men. Soldiers…

As the quarantine began, General Thomas Power put Strategic Air Command one step short of nuclear war, the rest of the armed forces staying at DEFCON 3, and sent the order uncoded so Moscow would hear it. An eighth of SAC’s bombers were kept airborne.

Destroyers and cruisers, with carriers behind them, waited on an arc across the Atlantic approaches, pulled in to about 500 nautical miles from Cuba to give Khrushchev more time. The line held until 20 November, when the Il-28 bombers were promised out too.

When word came that Soviet ships had stopped or turned back, Dean Rusk told Bundy: “We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked.” In fact, Dobbs found, the missile ships had turned for home more than a day earlier and were far from the line.

The first Games in Asia, broadcast live to the United States by satellite. The last torchbearer, Yoshinori Sakai, was born in Hiroshima Prefecture on 6 August 1945, the day the bomb fell.

About 90 per cent of Iceland’s women stopped work, housework and child care for the day. Some 25,000 rallied at Lækjartorg, in a country of about 220,000. Fathers took children to work, and shops ran out of sausages, the easiest meal to cook. The next year Iceland passed an equal rights law.

President Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act, ending forty years in which a federal board set fares and handed out routes. New airlines and fare wars followed; the Civil Aeronautics Board itself closed in 1985.

Three Concordes landed at Heathrow minutes apart: G-BOAG from New York, G-BOAE from Edinburgh and G-BOAF from a round trip over the Bay of Biscay. Supersonic passenger travel ended that afternoon.

Only 20 Concordes were built and just 14 flew for the airlines, seven each with British Airways and Air France. At Mach 2 and 60,000 feet, passengers could see the curve of the Earth and cross the Atlantic in about three and a half hours.