30 octobre

Franz Anton von Gerstner, an Austrian engineer, built the 27-kilometre line from Saint Petersburg to the tsar’s summer palaces and drove the first train himself. The run took 35 minutes. Nicholas I saw no need for more, and Russia’s next line, to Moscow, opened only in 1851.

On the Czarina Catherine the Scottish captain, Donelson, says fog followed his ship from London and a box was “put on board by a queer lookin’ old man”. A man came before sunrise with an order for it. The agent Immanuel Hildesheim, paid by an English bank note, handed it to a certain Petrof…

By the furnace door of a steam launch, Jonathan writes that they have decided “Mina’s guess was correct”: if the Count goes by water, it will be the Sereth and then the Bistritza. Lord Godalming, who has had launches on the Thames and the Norfolk Broads, fires the boiler.

Mr. Morris takes Mina to the Galatz hotel while the others call at the shipping agent, since he “does not speak any foreign language”. Lord Godalming returns from the Vice-Consul: the Consul is away and the Vice-Consul sick, but a clerk is obliging.

The men are tired and dispirited, so Mina types up the day’s notes on the “Traveller’s” typewriter. When she reads her memorandum aloud, Van Helsing says: “Our dear Madam Mina is once more our teacher.” Within the hour Godalming and Jonathan are off by steam launch, and she says goodbye to her…

Mina works out what the Count must do, in lettered points: “Count Dracula’s problem is to get back to his own place.” He must be taken, “confined as he is between dawn and sunset in his wooden box”, and by water, so the party can follow him up a river.

Near Galatz, Van Helsing hypnotises Mina a minute before sunrise. Her answer is “All is dark. I hear water swirling by, level with my ears, and the creaking of wood on wood.” The Count’s box is on the water, and the party reaches the port.

The industrialist Ernest Solvay gathered the leading physicists in Brussels to argue over the quantum. In the photograph she is the only woman among two dozen men, Einstein, Planck, Rutherford and Poincaré among them. Paul Langevin was there too.

Two pounds of personal gear a man, and not an ounce more. Before setting out they shot the weakest pups and Mrs Chippy, the carpenter’s cat. Hauling two boats on sledges through soft snow and pressure ridges, they gained under two miles in three days, and gave up.

A few hundred of General Krasnov’s Cossacks, all Kerensky could raise, met Red Guards and sailors south of the capital and fell back. Kerensky escaped from Gatchina in disguise two days later and left Russia for good.

Signed aboard the British battleship HMS Agamemnon. It opened the Straits to the Allies, who occupied Istanbul within weeks.

The Ottoman Empire left the war aboard the British battleship Agamemnon off Lemnos. Allied warships were in Constantinople within two weeks.

Russian and Ottoman armies fought over the mountains of eastern Anatolia in winters of deep snow. Russia took Erzurum in February 1916 and Trebizond that April; after the revolution its army dissolved and the Ottomans pushed on to Baku.

It began when the Ottoman fleet, led by two German warships, shelled Russian Black Sea ports. The empire fought in the Caucasus, Sinai, Mesopotamia and at Gallipoli, and won more battles than the Allies expected.

Orson Welles’s radio play told a Martian invasion as breaking news bulletins. Next morning’s papers reported nationwide panic, but later research found few people had been listening and fewer fled: the panic was largely a newspaper story, told by a press that saw radio as a rival.

Commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge for Martha Graham’s company. Copland called it “Ballet for Martha” until Graham took the title from a Hart Crane poem. Its variations on the Shaker song “Simple Gifts” won it the 1945 Pulitzer Prize.

A Soviet bomber dropped the largest bomb ever exploded over the Arctic islands of Novaya Zemlya. It yielded about 50 megatons, more than all the explosives of the Second World War put together, and its designers had halved its power to spare the aircraft.

Fourth console generationTurboGrafx-16

The 16-bit era: NEC’s PC Engine, Sega’s Mega Drive (Genesis in North America) and Nintendo’s Super Famicom. Sega’s advertising — “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” — made it the first real console war.