9 février

Besieged by the Mongols and their Song allies, the last Jin emperor, Aizong, handed the throne to a kinsman and hanged himself. The kinsman died in the fighting the same day, the shortest reign in Chinese history.

A small notebook, “Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke”: each work’s date, title and opening bars. The first entry is the piano concerto K. 449; the last, a Masonic cantata, is dated 15 November 1791. It is the backbone of every Mozart chronology since.

Four candidates split the 1824 vote and none won a majority. Andrew Jackson led with 99 electoral votes to Adams’s 84, but the House chose Adams on its first ballot, with 13 of 24 states. Jackson’s supporters called it a “corrupt bargain” when Adams made Henry Clay secretary of state.

The Paris appeal court gave Ferdinand de Lesseps, 87 and too frail to attend, and his son Charles five years each, and Eiffel two. The Cour de cassation quashed the verdicts in June because too much time had passed since the offences.

Repaired at New Zealand’s expense and commanded by John King Davis, with Shackleton aboard, “signed on” at a shilling a month. The ship sailed from Port Chalmers and came home to Wellington.

A New Style date. The Central Powers signed a separate treaty with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, recognising it in return for a million tonnes of grain, though Red troops were taking Kyiv as they signed.

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.

Before dawn, in rain, about 2,000 armed police began moving families out of the freehold suburb that was the heart of black Johannesburg’s jazz and writing, to Meadowlands in what became Soweto. The houses were bulldozed, and a white suburb built on the site was named Triomf, “triumph”.

A lunchtime session in a damp cellar under a fruit warehouse, for office workers on their break. The Cavern became their home ground: 292 appearances, the last on 3 August 1963.

CBS had 50,000 requests for 728 seats. At 8 p.m. Eastern the band played five songs, and 73 million Americans watched: a Nielsen rating of 45.3, then a record for an entertainment programme.

Boeing 747 first flightBoeing 747

The first wide-body airliner, with room for more than 350 passengers, built in a new factory at Everett that became the largest building in the world by volume. Pan Am had ordered it before it was designed.

Perihelion came on 9 February 1986, with the comet on the far side of the Sun from Earth: the poorest showing on record. Then it climbed out past the orbit of Neptune, slowing all the way.

GSI fused zinc with lead and saw one atom of element 112. It was named after Nicolaus Copernicus on his birthday, 19 February 2010.

One click to approve a friend’s post. It was nearly called “Awesome”. The Like gave Facebook a running measure of what each user cared about, and from 2010 it appeared on other websites too, reporting back to Facebook.

Bong Joon-ho’s satire of a poor family moving in on a rich one became the first film not in English to win Best Picture, in the Academy’s 92nd year. It also won Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature — and had won Korea’s first Palme d’Or.

The first Arab interplanetary mission, launched on a Japanese rocket from Tanegashima. Tianwen-1 arrived the next day, and Perseverance landed nine days later.

Three years after Dr. Dre led the first hip-hop halftime show, Lamar became the first solo rapper to headline it, performing in New Orleans with SZA as his guest. Its audience, 133.5 million by the NFL’s count, was the largest a halftime show had drawn.

In December 2014 Billboard began counting streams toward its album chart. Hip-hop listeners were young and streamed heavily, so the genre’s share of the charts climbed: Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Travis Scott and a wave of trap and SoundCloud rappers dominated the Billboard 200 for a decade.