24 janvier

Officers of his own Praetorian Guard, led by Cassius Chaerea, stabbed him in a passage of the palace. Guardsmen then found his uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor: the soldiers had chosen, and the Senate could only agree.

Henry VII built a new Lady Chapel as a shrine for Henry VI, whom he hoped to have made a saint; he lies there himself instead. Its pendant fan vault made John Leland call it the orbis miraculum, the wonder of the world.

To show that Indians were loyal subjects who deserved the rights of citizens, he raised an Indian Ambulance Corps of about 1,100 men for the British in the Boer War. At Spion Kop they carried the wounded from the battlefield; he received a war medal.

Twelve men, eight ponies and two dog teams to lay food for the next summer along the road south. The ponies sank in soft snow and weakened in the cold; several died, three of them when the sea ice broke up under their camp on the way home.

Macintosh unveiledMacintosh

Two days after Ridley Scott's “1984” ad ran nationally, once, during the Super Bowl. At Apple's shareholder meeting Steve Jobs pulled the machine out of a bag and let it introduce itself in its own synthesized voice. The windows and mouse PARC had pioneered were now on sale, for $2,495.

Still the only visit. It found ten new moons and the jumbled surface of Miranda. Four days later Challenger broke apart, and the news from Uranus was swept off the front pages.

A last burn put it in orbit around the second Lagrange point, 1.5 million km out, where Earth, Moon and Sun all stay behind its sunshield.