28 février

Constantine Lascaris’s Greek grammar, the Erotemata, dated the last day of February 1494 in the Venetian style, whose year began on 1 March: 1495 to us. Aldus Manutius set out to print the Greek classics, Aristotle first.

Cortés took the captive ruler with him on his long march to Honduras. Told of a plot, he had Cuauhtémoc and the lord of Tlacopan hanged from a ceiba tree. Bernal Díaz, who was on the march, thought the killing unjust.

In a Calcutta laboratory, C. V. Raman and K. S. Krishnan found that light scattered by molecules changes colour. Raman won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first for an Asian scientist, and India keeps 28 February as National Science Day.

Nine Norwegians, led by Joachim Rønneberg, climbed the gorge below Vemork, got in through a cable tunnel and blew up the high-concentration cells. No shot was fired, and all of them escaped, most on skis to Sweden.

Shuffling cardboard cut-outs of the bases, Watson saw that an A–T pair and a G–C pair have the same shape, which explained Chargaff’s rules. At lunch, by Watson’s account, Crick told everyone in the Eagle pub that they had found “the secret of life”.

The revolt spread to townships across the country. The official figure for the dead is usually given as 176, but that counted only the first days. The Cillié Commission counted 575 deaths by the end of February 1977, and other estimates run to about 700. Thousands of young people left to join the…

Herbie Hancock played his hit on the Grammy broadcast with Grandmixer D.ST scratching on turntables beside him: the first time most television viewers had seen a turntable played as an instrument.

After a missed first attempt in 1998, it became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, 433 Eros, on Valentine’s Day 2000. It was renamed for the planetary geologist Gene Shoemaker, who died in 1997.