17 octobre

In a room of the House with the Garden that was being redecorated, someone wrote in charcoal XVI K Nov: sixteen days before the Kalends of November, 17 October. The year is not written. Charcoal smudges and fades, so the excavators argue it went up in the last weeks before the eruption, which…

The Franks and their allies from Damascus and Homs met the Egyptian and Khwarazmian army near Gaza and were destroyed: the kingdom’s worst defeat since Hattin. Few Templars or Hospitallers escaped.

France’s ally David II of Scotland invaded England while Edward was at Calais, and was beaten outside Durham by the northern levies. He was wounded and captured, and spent eleven years a prisoner before his ransom was agreed at Berwick in 1357.

A second new star, first seen in Italy on 9 October and by Kepler, after days of cloud, on the 17th. It is still the last supernova seen with the naked eye in our galaxy.

The wedding serenata, K. 111, played the night after the wedding opera by Johann Adolf Hasse, the grand old man of Italian opera. Leopold crowed that his son’s piece had “struck down Hasse’s opera more than I can describe”.

After two battles at Freeman’s Farm and Bemis Heights, General Burgoyne gave up his whole army of about 5,900 men. The victory convinced France that the Americans could win.

Everything is fixed to welcome “the Count on his return from his tour”. Lord Godalming has told the shippers that the box may hold something stolen from a friend, and has a paper authorising him to open it on board and a similar one for the owner’s agent at Varna.

Gangs working from Port Augusta and Kalgoorlie met in the desert and linked Western Australia to the eastern states. On the Nullarbor Plain the line runs 478 kilometres without a curve, the longest straight stretch of railway in the world.

The new Institute for Advanced Study housed him in the university’s Fine Hall until its own Fuld Hall opened in 1939. He spent the rest of his life on a unified field theory that never came, and told a colleague he went to the Institute only for the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.

Japan forced Allied prisoners of war and Asian civilians to build about 415 kilometres of line through the jungle of Thailand and Burma. Of more than 60,000 prisoners, over 12,000 died. Of the Asian labourers, estimates run from about 75,000 (Australian War Memorial) to 90,000 (Anzac Portal) dead.

President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines’s amendment to article 34 of the constitution was published. Women first voted in a federal election on 3 July 1955.

Arab oil ministers meeting in Kuwait cut output and then embargoed the United States and others for backing Israel in the October War. Oil prices roughly quadrupled. Drivers queued for petrol, governments cut speed limits, and small, thrifty Japanese cars began to sell in America.

Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston's spreadsheet, and computing's first killer app: businesses bought an Apple II just to run it. Bricklin got the idea at Harvard Business School, watching a professor redo a table on a blackboard by hand every time one number changed.