29 janvier

Huldrych Zwingli, people’s priest at the Grossmünster, defended his 67 articles before some six hundred people in the town hall. The city council ruled that he preached from Scripture and told the clergy to do the same: a city, not a prince or a pope, had decided a question of faith.

A way into the Pacific that dodged the VOC's monopoly on the Strait of Magellan. They named the cape after Hoorn, their home town. The VOC seized their ship in Java anyway.

An opera seria for the Munich carnival, K. 366, and the first big dramatic score of his maturity. The libretto came from Salzburg, and the letters he sent his father about cutting and reshaping it are his workshop on paper.

The previous summer he had weighed it up on paper, with “better than a dog anyhow” in the case for, and concluded: “Marry—Marry—Marry Q.E.D.” Emma was devout and feared his doubts would part them after death; they had ten children.

Samurai who had lost their stipends and, in 1876, the right to wear swords rose in Satsuma under Saigō Takamori, a hero of the Restoration. Their fifty-day siege of Kumamoto Castle failed, and the new conscript army, mostly peasants, drove them back to Kagoshima.

The patent, for a “vehicle powered by a gas engine”, is called the automobile’s birth certificate. Steam carriages had run before, back to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s in Paris in 1769, but Benz designed engine and chassis as one: a three-wheeler with a single-cylinder four-stroke of under one…

Carl Benz’s patent 37435, for a “vehicle powered by a gas engine”, covered a three-wheeler with a single-cylinder engine of less than one horsepower. In August 1888 Bertha Benz drove it 106 kilometres from Mannheim to Pforzheim without telling her husband.