14 février

The city council had defended the Jews; the guilds deposed it, and on St Valentine’s Day the new council had the community burned in its cemetery. The chronicler Jacob Twinger von Königshofen gave about 2,000 dead; historians think the community was smaller. Debts owed to Jews were cancelled.…

Alexander Graham Bell’s patent application and Elisha Gray’s caveat for a similar telephone reached the Patent Office within hours of each other. Bell got patent 174,465 on 7 March, and his company spent years in court defending it. Antonio Meucci had filed a caveat for a talking telegraph in 1871…

King George V attended a national service for the five, and thousands stood outside. Scott’s journal, published that autumn as Scott’s Last Expedition, made the defeat the better-known story in Britain for decades.

By a Sovnarkom decree of January, the day after 31 January came 14 February. From here on the timeline’s dates are New Style. The Orthodox Church kept the Julian calendar, as it still does.

The Zurich court granted it after five years apart. The settlement gave Mileva the money from a Nobel Prize he had not yet won and was sure he would. When it came she bought three apartment houses in Zurich with it.

Built for the US Army to compute artillery firing tables: 27 tonnes, about 18,000 vacuum tubes and 5,000 additions a second. It was reprogrammed by rewiring plugboards and setting switches, work done by six women — Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Frances Bilas and…

The first Winter Games in Scandinavia, and the first with a torch relay: the flame was lit in the hearth of the skiing pioneer Sondre Norheim at Morgedal. The speed skater Hjalmar Andersen won three golds on Bislett’s ice.

Carl Sagan persuaded NASA to turn Voyager 1’s camera back for a family portrait of the planets. From about six billion kilometres, Earth is a fraction of a pixel in a band of scattered sunlight. The cameras were switched off soon after, for good.