7 août

With Heraclius away in the Caucasus, Avars and Slavs attacked the land walls while a Persian army watched from across the Bosporus. The Slav canoes were sunk in the Golden Horn, and the city credited the Virgin with the victory.

A goldsmith with no training as a builder closed a gap about 45 metres across without a wooden frame to hold it up. He laid some four million bricks in herringbone courses and invented an ox-driven hoist that could reverse without turning the oxen round. The lantern on top was finished in 1461.

The Treasury issued its own £1 and 10-shilling notes to replace gold coin in daily use. Britain never formally left gold, but gold sovereigns stopped circulating and never came back.

US Marines landed to take an airfield the Japanese were building in the Solomon Islands. Six months of fighting on land and in the waters around it followed, so many ships sank in the sound off the island that sailors called it Iron Bottom Sound.

Thor Heyerdahl drifted a balsa raft 101 days from Callao, Peru, to the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus to argue that Polynesia was settled from South America. It showed a raft could survive the trip; it did not show who settled the islands. Language, archaeology and DNA all trace Polynesians west,…

At the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences Trofim Lysenko denounced Mendelian genetics as bourgeois, and on the last day announced that the Central Committee had approved his report. Geneticists recanted or were dismissed, and genetics was banned in the Soviet Union until the mid-1960s. Its…

The only race between the only two men to have broken four minutes, at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games. Landy led until the last bend, looked over his left shoulder, and Bannister passed him on the right: 3:58.8 to 3:59.6, the first race with two men under four minutes. A bronze statue…

Boeing’s test pilot, flying the 367-80 prototype of the 707 over a hydroplane race on Lake Washington, rolled the airliner over in front of a crowd of airline chiefs. Asked by Boeing’s president what he was doing, he said he was selling airplanes.

Congress passes the Tonkin Gulf ResolutionGulf of Tonkin Resolution

It let the president “take all necessary measures” to repel attacks and prevent aggression. The House passed it 416 to 0 and the Senate 88 to 2; the two were Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening. Johnson treated it as his authority for the war.

Signed by President Lula this day. It is named after a pharmacist left paraplegic in 1983 when her husband shot her; his case dragged on for 19 years, and in 2001 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights held Brazil responsible. The law set up special courts and protective orders for violence…