10 décembre

Tortured and banished to his farm, Machiavelli wrote to his friend Francesco Vettori that each evening he put on court robes to converse with the ancients, and had written a little work on principalities. It was printed only in 1532.

Out of office, Machiavelli wrote to Francesco Vettori that at night he put on his court clothes to talk with the ancients in his books, and had composed “a little work, De principatibus”. It was printed in 1532, after his death.

The bull Exsurge Domine gave Luther sixty days to recant. When they ran out, he and his students burned it at the Elster Gate along with books of canon law. Rome excommunicated him on 3 January 1521. By then Wittenberg’s presses had made him the most-printed author in Germany.

Back from a failed attack on Quebec with no plunder to pay the troops, the Massachusetts Bay colony printed bills of credit: the first government paper money in the Western world.

Governor John Campbell signed the act, which let women of 21 vote and hold office. On 6 September 1870 Louisa Swain, aged 70, cast the first ballot under it in Laramie. Wyoming kept women’s suffrage when it became a state in 1890.

The first nomination named Becquerel and Pierre Curie only. Tipped off by Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Pierre wrote that he wanted to be considered together with his wife, and Marie Curie became the first woman Nobel laureate. Neither Curie went to Stockholm for the ceremony.

The French nomination named only Becquerel and Pierre. Tipped off by the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, Pierre wrote that he wanted to be considered together with Madame Curie, and the committee added her. She became the first woman Nobel laureate. Too ill and busy to travel, the…

For the discovery of radium and polonium and the isolation of radium. She went to Stockholm with Bronia and Irène and gave her lecture the next day. She was the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and remains the only one in two different sciences.

Twelve men in three teams of four hauled up one of the largest valley glaciers on Earth, first found by Shackleton, through deep soft snow and crevasses, to the Upper Glacier Depot at about 2,400 metres.

Max Planck and Walther Nernst came to Zurich in 1913 with an offer: a seat in the Prussian Academy, a professorship with no teaching duties, and later an institute of his own. It also brought him near his cousin Elsa Löwenthal, with whom he had begun an affair in 1912. Mileva hated the city. He…

Setting off from Caputh for a third winter in Pasadena, he told Elsa: “Take a very good look at it. You will never see it again.” They sailed from Bremerhaven with thirty pieces of luggage. Seven weeks later Hitler was chancellor.

The Chemistry prize, shared with Frédéric Joliot, for the synthesis of new radioactive elements. With Marie’s two and Pierre’s one, the family had five Nobel Prizes. Irène died of leukaemia in 1956, aged fifty-eight.

The prize was for new radioactive elements made by neutrons and for slow neutrons. Italy’s new racial laws threatened his wife Laura, who was Jewish, so the family sailed from Stockholm via England to New York, landing on 2 January 1939.

The ANC’s president, banned to his village of Groutville, was given leave to travel to Oslo for the 1960 prize, the first to an African. Six days after the ceremony, Umkhonto we Sizwe set off its first bombs at government buildings in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban.

Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Physiology or Medicine prize “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material”.

At 35, the youngest man yet to win it. He gave the prize money to the movement.

Two sediment cores from the southern Indian Ocean, spanning 450,000 years, showed climate cycles of about 23,000, 42,000 and 100,000 years: the periods of Earth’s orbit. James Hays, John Imbrie and Nicholas Shackleton’s paper settled the argument in Milankovitch’s favour.

The Anglican bishop, general secretary of the South African Council of Churches, was the second South African to win it after Luthuli. He used the platform to call for economic pressure on the government.

President Gustáv Husák, installed after the 1968 invasion, swore in a “government of national understanding” with a non-Communist majority under Marián Čalfa, then stepped down.

id Software put the first episode out free as shareware on a University of Wisconsin server, which buckled under the players trying to download it. Players could link office computers to hunt each other — John Romero called it “deathmatch” — and build their own levels, and system administrators…

The two rivals were honoured “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa”. Thirty-two years earlier the ANC’s then president, Albert Luthuli, had received the prize in the same city.

On Human Rights Day he signed the final Constitution into law in the township where police had killed sixty-nine people in 1960. Its Bill of Rights bars discrimination on grounds including race, gender and sexual orientation.

A petrol engine and an electric motor sharing one drivetrain made it the first mass-produced hybrid car. The Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gases was adopted the next day.

Shanghai’s river port was too shallow for the new ships, so it built a terminal on islands out at sea, joined to the mainland by the 32.5-kilometre Donghai Bridge.

Awarded “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change”. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chair, accepted it for the panel.

A law passed in November 2024 made sixteen the minimum age for accounts on the biggest platforms, among them Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X and YouTube. The platforms, not children or parents, face fines of up to A$49.5 million.