3 novembre

His Letter on the Blind let a blind mathematician doubt that the universe showed a designer. Diderot was taken to the keep of Vincennes by lettre de cachet and let out only after promising never to publish anything like it again. The Encyclopédie’s publishers had lobbied for his release.

A century of lost wars against Austria and Russia, and of sultans who tried to build a modern army around the Janissaries until Mahmud II destroyed them in 1826.

Foreign Minister Mustafa Reşid Pasha read the young Abdülmecid’s decree in the palace’s rose garden, promising security of life, honour and property to every subject, fair taxes and a fair draft.

The “reorderings”: ministries, courts, schools, a census and a new law of citizenship, designed by bureaucrats of the Sublime Porte rather than the palace. Their boldest promise was equality before the law for Muslims and non-Muslims.

Almon Strowger, a Kansas City undertaker, suspected the operator — the wife of a rival undertaker — of sending his callers to her husband. So he invented a switch the caller worked himself. The first public exchange using it opened in La Porte, Indiana, without operators.

At Fundu they learn the launch went up the Bistritza. Signs of snow are coming, and if it falls heavy they must take a sledge and go on, “Russian fashion”.

With the gunboat USS Nashville off Colón, the American-run railway carried the Colombian generals to Panama City and left their troops behind. The generals were arrested and a junta declared independence that evening. Washington recognised the new republic three days later.

Signed near Padua, to take effect the next afternoon. By then the empire it was signed for was already dissolving: Czechoslovakia and the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs had declared themselves in October.

A year to the day after Caporetto, Italian, British and French troops crossed the Piave. The Habsburg army, its nations already breaking away, fell apart, and Austria-Hungary signed an armistice at Villa Giusti on 3 November.

Ordered out for a last battle with the Royal Navy, sailors of the High Seas Fleet refused. The mutiny spread to Kiel and within days workers’ and soldiers’ councils held cities across Germany.

Promulgated this day; in force from 3 May 1947. Marriage “shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes”, and laws on property, inheritance and divorce must rest on “the essential equality of the sexes”. Beate Sirota Gordon, a 22-year-old civilian on MacArthur’s staff, drafted it in…

An elderly couple visit their grown children in Tokyo, who are too busy for them. Yasujirō Ozu kept his camera low, at the eye level of someone kneeling on a tatami mat, and barely moved it. In 2012 Sight and Sound’s poll of directors named it the greatest film ever made.

Built in about four weeks to mark the 40th anniversary of the revolution, with no way home for its passenger. Moscow let the world believe the dog had lived for days; in 2002 a Russian scientist revealed that she died of overheating within hours.

The first gravity assist: it swung past Venus on 5 February 1974 to fall inward to Mercury. Giuseppe “Bepi” Colombo worked out that the orbit could bring it back to Mercury again and again, and it met the planet three times before its gas ran out.

During an international environmental conference in Sofia, several thousand people carried an Ecoglasnost petition against dam projects to the National Assembly: the first large unsanctioned demonstration in Communist Bulgaria.

Vanilla Ice’s single was the first rap record to top the Billboard Hot 100. Its bass line came from Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure”, uncredited; the case was settled out of court and the writers of the original were added to the credits.

In the ACTG 076 trial, 25.5 per cent of babies born to mothers on placebo acquired HIV, against 8.3 per cent on AZT. The trial was stopped early, and prevention in pregnancy became routine where the drug could be afforded.

Cash Money Records of New Orleans, with Mannie Fresh’s bounce-driven beats, had just signed a distribution deal with Universal worth a reported $30 million. The album went four times platinum and made the Magnolia Projects’ sound a national one.