14 septembre

Thursday 14 September followed Wednesday 2 September: eleven days were dropped to catch up with Catholic Europe. The Treasury kept its full year, moving its year-end from 25 March to 5 April, which is why Britain’s tax year still begins on 6 April.

Reading the cartouches of Ramesses and Thutmose in new copies from Abu Simbel, Jean-François Champollion saw that hieroglyphs mixed sound signs with word signs. He ran to his brother’s office at the Institut, cried “Je tiens l’affaire !” — “I’ve got it!” — and collapsed, as the story is usually…

Hours after McKinley died, Theodore Roosevelt took the oath in a friend’s library in Buffalo. At 42 he is still the youngest person to become president.

In 1904 the United States took over the Panama Canal works abandoned by France, and Roosevelt won a full term of his own.

His new vice president was Theodore Roosevelt, the former governor of New York. The term lasted six months.

The first rover on another world, driven from the Crimea by a crew watching a slow television feed. It covered about 10.5 km over eleven lunar days. Its laser reflector was found again in 2010 and still bounces back pulses fired from Earth.

Ashanti DeSilva, four, lacked the enzyme ADA and with it most of her immune system. At the NIH Clinical Center she was given back her own white blood cells, carrying a working copy of the gene delivered by a virus. It helped, though she stayed on enzyme treatment.

Savers lined up outside branches from Newcastle to London, on television, for three days: the first run on a British bank since 1866. It stopped only when Alistair Darling, the chancellor, guaranteed every deposit on 17 September.

Japan’s Kaguya, China’s Chang’e 1 and India’s Chandrayaan-1 went to the Moon within thirteen months of each other, and NASA followed with its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Since then China, India and Japan have all landed there.

When news broke that the Bank of England was lending it emergency money, depositors queued outside its branches: Britain’s first bank run in well over a century. It was nationalised in February 2008.

Barclays was ready to buy Lehman if someone would guarantee its trading until shareholders could vote. The British regulator would not waive the vote, and the chancellor, Alistair Darling, would not import America’s risk. Lehman had no buyer left.

While Lehman’s fate was argued over at the Fed, Merrill’s chief executive, John Thain, went to Bank of America instead. By Sunday night it had agreed to pay about 50 billion dollars, 29 dollars a share, for the 94-year-old firm.

The ripple from the black-hole merger 1.3 billion years ago reached LIGO’s Livingston detector 7 milliseconds before the one in Hanford, 3,000 kilometres away. Einstein predicted such waves in 1916 and doubted they could ever be measured.