11 juillet

The Ming history counts 62 treasure ships and some 27,800 men; a later source adds 255 smaller vessels for 317 in all, which Dreyer thinks counts some ships twice. It sailed by Champa, Java, Palembang, Malacca and Sumatra to Ceylon and Calicut, the great pepper port of the Malabar coast, and back.

Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, twenty years old, read a memoir to the Paris Academy proving part of the case n = 5. Legendre completed the other part later that year, and the case was closed.

Turkish customs officers board the schooner at the Bosphorus on 11 July and again at the Dardanelles on 12 July, each time for a little “backsheesh”, and are quick about it.

Women competed for the first time in 1900: 22 of 997 athletes, in tennis, golf, sailing, croquet and equestrian events. Cooper, a five-time Wimbledon champion, won the singles and became the first woman to win an individual Olympic event.

Desgrange’s aide Alphonse Steinès talked him into a climb of nearly 1,200 metres. René Pottier rode up without getting off, the first to do so.

A laureate owes a lecture. He gave his seven months late, to the Nordic Assembly of Naturalists with King Gustaf V in the audience, and spoke about relativity, the one thing the prize had pointedly left out.

Launched the day before, Bell Labs’ Telstar relayed television from Andover, Maine, to the French station at Pleumeur-Bodou. In low orbit it was in view of both sides for only about twenty minutes a pass. The Tornados’ instrumental “Telstar” topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

Mandela had lived on the farm as “David”, a worker. Police arrested Walter Sisulu, Govan Mbeki, Ahmed Kathrada and others there, with a plan for guerrilla war called Operation Mayibuye and papers in Mandela’s own hand, which put him in the dock beside them.

A new law allowed detention without trial for ninety days at a time. Acting on a tip-off, police found Umkhonto we Sizwe’s leaders at their hideout in Rivonia. At the trial that followed, eight of the accused, Nelson Mandela among them, were sentenced to life on 12 June 1964.

The first World Cup with a mascot, World Cup Willie. Portugal came back from 3–0 down to beat North Korea 5–3 with four goals by Eusébio, the tournament’s top scorer.

The American Bobby Fischer against the Soviet champion Boris Spassky, a Cold War proxy fought in Iceland. Fischer nearly did not come: the British financier Jim Slater doubled the prize fund to $250,000, and Henry Kissinger telephoned him to urge him to play.

In a dead-drawn ending Fischer grabbed a pawn with his bishop on move 29, saw it trapped, and lost.

A spectator punched Merckx in the side near the summit. Two days later Bernard Thévenet dropped him at Pra-Loup and took yellow; Merckx never won the Tour again.

Paolo Rossi, back from a two-year ban in a betting scandal, scored first and finished top scorer. Marco Tardelli’s screaming run after the second goal is the picture everyone kept. Dino Zoff, 40, lifted the trophy.

Algeria beat West Germany on their debut. The semi-final between West Germany and France in Seville was the first World Cup match settled on penalties.

Adopted by the African Union this day; in force from 2005. Its Article 14 was the first treaty provision to require medical abortion in cases of rape or incest, or where the pregnancy endangers the woman’s health or life. It also sets 18 as the minimum age of marriage and gives widows a right to…

After Senator Chuck Schumer’s letter questioning the Pasadena lender was made public, depositors took out 1.3 billion dollars in eleven days. Regulators closed it on a Friday; on Monday customers queued outside its branches to get the rest.

A month earlier his great-granddaughter Zenani had been killed in a car crash on the way home from the World Cup’s opening concert. Before the final he was driven round the pitch in a golf cart, waving, in his last public appearance before a crowd.

Andrés Iniesta scored four minutes before penalties in a final with 14 yellow cards. Spain were the first champions to lose their opening match, to Switzerland.

The first World Cup in Africa, remembered for the drone of the vuvuzela. South Africa became the first hosts out in the group stage. Frank Lampard’s shot against Germany landed a metre over the line and was not given, which moved FIFA to goal-line technology.

The lake’s layered mud records plutonium from 1950s bomb tests, so a working group chose it to mark a new epoch. In March 2024 the geologists’ vote went against it: officially we still live in the Holocene.