25 janvier

About thirty artists and craftsmen, among them Leonardo, Botticelli, Perugino and Filippino Lippi, gave their opinions. The minutes are dated 25 January 1503 in the Florentine style, which historians restate as 1504; that is where it falls here.

About thirty artists and craftsmen met at the cathedral works to decide where the statue should stand. Leonardo sided with putting it under the Loggia dei Lanzi; it went outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Florence dated the meeting 25 January 1503, which is 1504 by modern count.

Astronomer Royal, aged 85, sixteen years before the test; in England’s Old Style it was 14 January 1741. His posthumous tables asked posterity, if it came back, to acknowledge that this was “first discovered by an Englishman”.

Indebted farmers in western Massachusetts had closed the courts to stop foreclosures. When Daniel Shays’ men marched on the federal arsenal, militia fired grapeshot and killed four. Congress had had no money to send troops.

In the small hours, some 600 Africans, many of them Muslims of Yoruba (Nagô) and Hausa origin, fought through the streets of Salvador. About 70 rebels were killed; hundreds more were flogged, deported or imprisoned, and four were shot.

99 days and about 3,000 kilometres after setting out, with two sledges and eleven dogs. In September 1909 he had written into his plan: “Thus we shall be back from the Polar journey on January 25.”

Downhill and downwind, from cairn to cairn, the party averaged 22½ miles a day, picking up each depot and cairn they had left on the way out.

Bell in New York repeated his famous request to Watson, now in San Francisco, who replied that it would take him a week to get there. The 3,400-mile line worked only because of vacuum-tube amplifiers, which boosted the voice along the way.

Held as an “International Winter Sports Week” under the patronage of the IOC, and named the first Winter Olympics afterwards. Charles Jewtraw of the United States won the first event, the 500 metres speed skating.

For sixty-eight years the Winter and Summer Games fell in the same year. In 1986 the IOC voted to split them, and the next Winter Games came two years after Albertville, at Lillehammer in 1994.

Hitler’s last offensive in the west came through the snow-bound Ardennes, aiming for Antwerp. It surrounded the Americans at Bastogne, whose commander answered a German surrender demand with one word: “Nuts!”

After bouncing on its airbags it rolled into a small crater, a “hole in one”, whose walls were bedrock. Within weeks it had found rocks laid down in water, studded with hematite spheres the team called blueberries.

A Facebook page, “We Are All Khaled Said”, named for a young man beaten to death by police and run anonymously by Google executive Wael Ghonim, called people out on Police Day. Tens of thousands came.