25 mai

Twenty-five returns seen, feared and recorded, and never recognised as the same comet. Aristotle had taught that comets were fires in the upper air, and for most of these centuries a comet was read as a warning: of a ruler’s death, a war, a conquest.

The Shiji, Sima Qian’s history, records a broom star in the seventh year of the king of Qin who became the First Emperor: seen first in the east, then in the north, then in the west. Worked back from the orbit, it is the earliest certain record of Halley’s Comet. Older sightings, from China and…

Bishop Conrad of Lichtenberg laid the first stone of the façade credited to Erwin von Steinbach. Two towers were planned; only the north one was built, finished by Johannes Hültz in 1439. At 142 metres it was the world’s tallest building from 1647, when a taller spire at Stralsund burned, until…

The first imperial diet of the young Emperor Charles V. Luther came under a safe conduct. The Edict of Worms, issued as the diet broke up, made him an outlaw whom anyone might kill and banned his books throughout the Empire.

Called to revise the Articles, the delegates threw them out and met in secret all summer. What we know of the debates comes mostly from James Madison’s notes, published in 1840.

Firedamp exploded in a colliery near Gateshead and 92 men and boys died. The disaster led to a society for preventing pit accidents, which asked Humphry Davy for a safe lamp; he produced it in 1815.

Rejected by Lucy the day before, Dr. Seward goes back to work and to a patient who interests him, and enters the first of his notes on R. M. Renfield, ætat 59: “Sanguine temperament; great physical strength; morbidly excitable.” The diary is marked “Kept in phonograph”, a machine that will matter…

Quincey Morris invites Arthur to a dinner at his “camp-fire” the next night with “our old pal at the Korea, Jack Seward”. All three of Lucy’s suitors are friends, and he proposes to drink “a health with all our hearts to the happiest man in all the wide world”.

Kennedy to a joint session of Congress: I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. At the time the United States had 15 minutes of human spaceflight to its name: Shepard’s,…

First light of the Very Large TelescopeVery Large Telescope

The first of four 8.2-metre telescopes on Cerro Paranal, in one of the driest places on Earth. They carry Mapuche names for the Sun, Moon, Southern Cross and Venus, and can be combined into one interferometer. The staff residence played a villain’s lair in Quantum of Solace.

On the morning of his funeral, container ships around the world sounded their whistles in his honour.

Polling day; the result was declared at Dublin Castle the next afternoon. 66.4 per cent voted to remove the 1983 amendment that gave the unborn an equal right to life with the mother. Abortion on request up to 12 weeks began in January 2019.

A count of every animal recorded from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the nodule fields where mining would start, found 5,578 species, and 88 to 92 percent of them had no scientific name.