4 de octubre

Philip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together to unite the Protestants against the emperor. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles and split on the fifteenth: whether Christ’s body is really present in the bread. Luther chalked “Hoc est corpus meum” on the table.

A Thursday. Teresa of Ávila died that night, and was buried the next day: 15 October.

A Thursday. Gregory XIII’s bull Inter gravissimas carried out a reform the Council of Trent had asked for: drop ten days to bring the spring equinox back to 21 March, and skip three leap days every four centuries from then on.

Georges Nagelmackers’s Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits ran sleeping and dining cars through six countries. The route was not yet all rail: from Giurgiu passengers crossed the Danube, took a train to Varna and finished the trip to Constantinople by ship.

Van Helsing leaves a message on the phonograph for Jonathan, who is to stay with Mina: “He, our enemy, have gone away; he have gone back to his Castle in Transylvania.” The Count was cornered, he says, and “he find ship going by the route he came”; the party is off to learn which ship.

Jonathan reads Van Helsing’s message to Mina, and “the certainty that the Count is out of the country” brightens her. For him, “now that his horrible danger is not face to face with us, it seems almost impossible to believe in it”.

At grey dawn Mina asks Jonathan to call the Professor at once. At sunrise Van Helsing hypnotises her, and she answers him: water lapping, the creak of masts. The Count is on a ship, and the party will learn it was bound for the Black Sea.

Mina wakes Jonathan with a warning hand over his mouth: “Hush! there is someone in the corridor!” It is Mr. Morris, wide awake on a mattress outside the door, keeping watch.

From the discovery that the Count is bound for Varna on the Czarina Catherine to his end at sunset on 6 November, by train, river and road. The sea and river legs are approximate on the map.

Van Helsing reads Jonathan’s journal and the diaries are joined. The group that critics call the Crew of Light hunts the Count’s boxes from Carfax to Piccadilly, until his flight on the night of 3–4 October.

After heavy rain, about 500,000 cubic yards of clay on the east bank began to move into the Cut, burying tracks and shovels. Cucaracha kept sliding for years, and was still moving after the canal opened.

The first man under 4:10. A few months later the French federation banned him for life for taking money above expenses, and he missed the 1932 Olympics he had been favourite to win.

One year and nine months. The ban of 1932 meant he never raced again as an amateur to defend it.

Eight years and six weeks, four days longer than Taber’s.

McLean’s next step was a converted freighter whose holds were fitted with steel cell guides, so boxes could be stacked below deck without lashing. She carried 226 containers and her own cranes. Her engineer, Keith Tantlinger, gave the boxes twist-lock corner fittings, the ancestor of today’s.

A 58-centimetre ball that beeped went up on an R-7, the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile. If the Soviets could put a satellite in orbit, they could put a warhead on any American city. The catalogue’s Space Race timeline follows what came next.

The first artificial satellite carried nothing but a radio transmitter, on frequencies chosen so that amateurs everywhere could hear it. Its beeps lasted about three weeks, until the batteries ran down.

Ten months in which a beeping ball persuaded Americans they were losing the Cold War. Washington answered with ARPA, with money for science education and, when Eisenhower signed the Space Act, with NASA.

An 83.6 kg polished sphere, 58 cm across, that did nothing but beep on 20.005 and 40.002 MHz. Radio amateurs everywhere could hear it, which was the point. Its batteries died after 21 days, and it burned up on 4 January 1958.

The bigger club down the street, shared with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, whose drummer was Ringo Starr. On 15 October Lennon, McCartney and Harrison backed the Hurricanes’ singer Lu Walters on a private disc with Starr on drums: the first time the four recorded together.

The freighter Indigirka docked at Mariel carrying nuclear warheads for the R-12s, the cruise missiles, the Il-28 bombers and the short-range Luna rockets, their combined yield many times all the bombs of the Second World War. American intelligence never spotted her.

East Berlin insisted the embassy refugees travel west through East German territory, to expel them formally. As the trains neared, thousands stormed Dresden’s main station hoping to climb aboard, and police beat them back.

Games moved to 3D polygons and CD-ROMs. Sony’s PlayStation won, Sega’s Saturn faded, and the Nintendo 64 was the last major console to keep cartridges.

Zuckerberg announced that more than one billion people used Facebook every month, eight and a half years after the launch at Harvard.