1 septembre

A Spanish army sacked nearby Prato, the republic gave in, and Giuliano de’ Medici rode back into the city. Among the officials swept out was the secretary of the Second Chancery, Niccolò Machiavelli.

HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara spliced the cable in mid-ocean and steamed apart, landing its ends in Ireland and Newfoundland on 5 August. It worked for about three weeks, at a crawl. The company’s electrician, Wildman Whitehouse, drove it with ever higher voltages until the insulation gave way.

Barographs from Europe to South America recorded the air wave as it spread from Krakatau, closed in on the far side of the world near Bogotá, and rolled back. Strachey found it passing many stations not fewer than seven times over about five days, four times outward and three times back: three and…

Summoned to his father, who is worse, Arthur wires Seward to write him at Ring: “Write me fully by to-night’s post.”

Georges Méliès, a stage magician, built a glass-walled studio in his garden at Montreuil and used it to invent the special effect: stop-motion substitutions, multiple exposures, painted sets. The rocket landing in the Man in the Moon’s eye became cinema’s first icon — and pirated prints in America…

Sultan Abdul Hamid II built a line for pilgrims from Damascus to Medina, paid for partly by donations from Muslims around the world. It reached Medina on the anniversary of his accession, but never Mecca. In 1917–18 Arab forces and T. E. Lawrence raided it, and south of Jordan it never ran again.

Built from Damascus for pilgrims and soldiers, and paid for largely by donations from Muslims worldwide. It opened on the anniversary of Abdülhamid’s accession and never reached Mecca.

With makeshift clothing and four dogs, the party man-hauled south to lay the depots Shackleton had asked for. By Richards’s count the journeys came to 1,561 miles in 160 days, 830 of them to Mount Hope and back. Scurvy set in on the way home.

A muddle of go-betweens turned into a march on the capital. Kornilov sent cavalry towards Petrograd; railwaymen and agitators stopped them without a battle. Kerensky had to arm the Red Guards and free the Bolsheviks to defend himself. Whether Kornilov planned a coup is still argued.

General Alekseyev took him into custody at Mogilev. Held at Bykhov with Denikin and others, he walked out in November and went south to raise a White army.

On the day Germany invaded Poland, Physical Review published Bohr and John Wheeler’s theory of fission. Slow neutrons split the rare isotope uranium-235, 0.7 per cent of natural uranium, not the common uranium-238.

At 04:45 the old battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish depot at Westerplatte in Danzig, as German armies crossed the border from the west, north and south. The garrison of some 200 men held out for seven days.

Between the wars, prizes and newspapers paid for record flights across oceans and continents, and the first airlines stitched together routes to India, Africa, Australia and across the Pacific. By the end of the 1930s the all-metal monoplane airliner had arrived.

Air power decided battles at sea and on land, and bombers carried the war to cities. The United States alone built nearly 300,000 military aircraft, and the war left behind long runways, radar and a generation of pilots for the airlines.

Five years and eight months from the invasion of Poland to Germany’s unconditional surrender. At its height in 1942 Germany and its allies held Europe from the Atlantic coast of France to the Volga, and from Norway’s North Cape to Crete.

Germany’s civil service law of 7 April 1933 drove Jewish and dissenting scholars from their posts, among them roughly a quarter of its physicists. Einstein, Franck, Born, Bethe, Frisch, Peierls, Szilárd and Teller left; Italy’s racial laws added Fermi in 1938. Much of the Manhattan Project’s…

When rioting broke out again he fasted until Calcutta stopped. After three days local gang leaders came to lay down their weapons at his bedside, and the city stayed quiet through the autumn.

Waiting for a bus in New York, Ralph Baer, who ran an equipment design division at the defence contractor Sanders Associates, thought of playing games on the ordinary television set most American homes already had. He wrote it up in four pages. His seventh prototype, the 1968 “Brown Box” wrapped…

The American Bobby Fischer against the Soviet champion Boris Spassky, a Cold War proxy fought in Iceland. Fischer nearly did not come: the British financier Jim Slater doubled the prize fund to $250,000, and Henry Kissinger telephoned him to urge him to play.

Game 21 had been adjourned the evening before; Spassky phoned in his resignation. Fischer won 12½–8½, then played no competitive game for twenty years and lost the title to Anatoly Karpov by default in 1975.

A Boeing 747 from Anchorage to Seoul strayed over Soviet territory and was shot down by a Soviet interceptor west of Sakhalin. All 269 people on board died, among them an American congressman.

Robert Ballard of Woods Hole and Jean-Louis Michel of the French institute IFREMER found the wreck at 3,800 m with Argo, a camera sled towed from Knorr. The first thing it showed was one of the boilers. The Navy paid for the search on condition that Ballard first surveyed the wrecks of two lost…

First light of SALTSouthern African Large Telescope

The Southern African Large Telescope, near Sutherland in the Karoo, has 91 hexagonal segments making an 11-metre mirror: the largest single optical telescope in the southern hemisphere. The mirror stays at a fixed tilt; to follow a star, the instruments ride across its focus instead.