26 mai

The besiegers cut the aqueduct from Chapultepec and closed the causeways. Fewer than a thousand Spaniards fought beside armies of Tlaxcala, Texcoco, Huexotzinco and Chalco, and the city was taken block by block, its buildings pulled down to fill the canals.

A cord jerked the shuttle through the warp, so one weaver could weave broadcloth that had needed two. Weavers could now use up yarn faster than spinners could make it. Kay spent his money suing manufacturers who copied it, and died in France.

Staunton organised it to coincide with the Great Exhibition: sixteen players in a knock-out. The German schoolteacher Adolf Anderssen won; Staunton finished fourth.

After three weeks at higher prices, entry dropped to one shilling from Monday to Thursday, and railway excursions brought factory workers from the North by the trainload. They were the great majority of the visitors.

The House impeached him 126–47 three days after he tried to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in defiance of the Tenure of Office Act. With Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding, the Senate acquitted on three of eleven articles and adjourned without voting on the rest.

Arthur answers Quincey by wire: “Count me in every time. I bear messages which will make both your ears tingle.” It is signed with his nickname, “Art”.

Emanuel Lasker, 25, beat the 58-year-old Steinitz by ten wins to five, with four draws, in a match played in New York, Philadelphia and Montreal. He held the title for 27 years, the longest reign of any champion.

Ford built more than 15 million Model Ts, high enough for rutted farm roads and simple enough to mend with basic tools. As output rose the price fell, from $850 in 1908 to under $300 by the mid-1920s. Ford wrote that a customer could have it “painted any color that he wants so long as it is black”.

The streamlined Pioneer Zephyr ran non-stop from Denver to Chicago in about 13 hours, dawn to dusk, and General Motors’ diesels followed. They needed no water stops and fewer crew, and by 1960 steam had all but vanished from American main lines.

The plant near Fallersleben was to build Ferdinand Porsche’s KdF-Wagen, the “Strength Through Joy” car. Hundreds of thousands of Germans paid into savings schemes for one, but no saver ever got a car: the works made military vehicles in the war, with forced labourers and prisoners doing much of…

Destroyers, ferries and hundreds of small civilian boats took 338,226 men off the beaches and the harbour mole, a third of them French. Churchill told the Commons on 4 June that “wars are not won by evacuations”, then: “we shall fight on the beaches … we shall never surrender.”

Under Malan, J. G. Strijdom and H. F. Verwoerd the government passed law after law: separate beaches, buses, post-office counters and park benches under the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953, stricter pass laws, and the removal of coloured voters from the common roll in the Cape. Signs…

D. F. Malan’s party won on a programme it called apartheid, “apartness”. Laws followed fast: mixed marriages banned in 1949, every person classified by race and every town zoned by race in 1950, and in 1953 a separate, inferior schooling for black children.

D. F. Malan’s Reunited National Party and its ally, the Afrikaner Party, won 79 seats to 71 for Jan Smuts’s United Party and Labour, on fewer votes: rural seats held fewer voters. Only whites, and some coloured men in the Cape, could vote. Smuts lost his own seat.

The first assault pair, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, used experimental closed-circuit oxygen and reached the South Summit, the highest point anyone had reached, about 100 metres below the top. With Evans’s set failing and the day too far gone, they turned back.

An album by an imaginary band, in a Peter Blake and Jann Haworth sleeve crowded with cardboard heroes, and one of the first pop LPs with its lyrics printed on the back. For “A Day in the Life” a 40-piece orchestra was told to climb from its lowest note to its highest in 24 bars.

Nixon and Brezhnev signed the first limits on strategic arms in the Kremlin: a freeze on missile launchers, and a treaty allowing each side only two anti-missile sites, so that neither could hope to escape retaliation.

On Cerro Armazones, 23 kilometres from Paranal, ESO began a telescope with a 39-metre mirror of 798 segments, almost four times as wide as any before it. First light is planned for the end of the decade.