1 mai

The first emperor to step down of his own accord, he withdrew to his palace on the Adriatic, whose walls still hold the old town of Split. Asked to return to power, he said that if they could see the cabbages he had grown they would not ask.

The king who ended Tikal’s hiatus. He lies in Burial 116 beneath Temple I, the 47-metre pyramid built over his tomb on the Great Plaza, facing Temple II across it. Long Count 9.12.9.17.16 5 Kib 14 Sotz’

The emperor Frederick II sailed years late and excommunicated for the delay, with a small army and no papal blessing.

K. 492, the first opera with Lorenzo Da Ponte, from a Beaumarchais play banned from the Vienna stage. Encores ran so long that after the third night the Emperor banned encores of anything but solo arias. Vienna gave it only nine performances that year.

A Bank of England note could be exchanged on demand for the gold sovereign, with 7.32 grams of fine gold. London became the centre of world finance, and other countries followed it onto gold.

A French landing in Wales set off a run on the Bank, and the government ordered it to stop paying gold for its notes. The war was fought on paper money; Gillray drew the Bank as “the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”.

Queen Victoria opened it and Prince Albert had driven it. Some 100,000 exhibits from Britain, its empire and the world filled a glass hall 564 metres long, and just over six million visits were paid. The profit bought the land in South Kensington where the V&A, the Science Museum and the Natural…

“We said good-bye to the sun on May 1.” Before noon on 26 July the top of the sun showed by refraction for one minute. In between, the men held concerts and an “Antarctic Derby” for the dog teams, and listened to the floes grinding against the hull.

Promulgated this day, the People’s Republic’s first major law. It banned arranged and forced marriage, bigamy, concubinage, child betrothal and demands for gifts at marriage, and let either spouse sue for divorce. So many women did that it was nicknamed the “divorce law”.

From Base Camp at about 5,450 metres Hillary, George Band and George Lowe forced a route through the Icefall; Sherpas then ferried tonnes of stores over its crevasses on ladders and ropes. When Hillary fell into a crevasse, Tenzing held him on the rope. Advance Base went up in the Cwm on 1 May.

Five days out of Newark the ship tied up in Houston, where 58 trucks were waiting to hitch up the trailers and drive them away. Nobody had touched the cargo inside.

A Soviet missile brought down Francis Gary Powers’s spy plane over the Urals on May Day. Washington claimed a lost weather plane until Khrushchev revealed he had the pilot, alive, and the Paris summit two weeks later collapsed on its first day.

At 4 a.m., John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz's language ran for the first time, on a time-sharing system that let students use one computer at once from teletype terminals. BASIC was built for people who were not scientists; a decade later it was the first language on nearly every home computer.

A double-hulled canoe built by the Polynesian Voyaging Society to test Andrew Sharp’s 1956 claim that the islands were found by accidental drift. Navigated without instruments by Mau Piailug of Satawal in Micronesia, it sailed from Honolua Bay on Maui and reached Papeete a month later, where some…

The parade went ahead down Khreshchatyk, with children and banners, as radiation readings in the city rose. Holding it was a decision taken in Moscow: cancelling it would have admitted the danger.

A search expedition found Mallory’s body at about 8,155 metres on the North Face; Conrad Anker saw it first. A rope injury round his waist showed he had been roped when he fell. His camera was not with him, nor the photograph of his wife Ruth he had meant to leave on top.