21 gennaio

In the house of Felix Manz’s mother, Conrad Grebel baptized the former priest George Blaurock, who then baptized the others. Baptizing believers rather than infants broke with Zwingli and with every state church, Catholic or Protestant.

Count Galeazzo Arconati gave Leoni’s great album, with eleven smaller notebooks, to Milan’s library. Napoleon’s commissioners took them to Paris in 1796; in 1815 only the Codex Atlanticus came back, and the notebooks are still in Paris, at the Institut de France.

Charles Messier had searched for it for eighteen months from the Hôtel de Cluny. His employer, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, kept the find quiet until April. Messier went on to hunt comets all his life, cataloguing the fuzzy objects that could be mistaken for them.

Planned in Gil Evans’s one-room basement flat on West 55th Street, Miles Davis’s nine-piece band, with Gerry Mulligan, John Lewis and Lee Konitz, recorded for Capitol in three sessions, in January and April 1949 and March 1950. The twelve sides were collected on an LP titled Birth of the Cool only…

Some 6,000 Marines and South Vietnamese Rangers were surrounded on a plateau near the Laotian border. Westmoreland expected a second Dien Bien Phu and answered with B-52 strikes around the clock. Relieved in April, the base was razed and abandoned in July.

Only 20 Concordes were built and just 14 flew for the airlines, seven each with British Airways and Air France. At Mach 2 and 60,000 feet, passengers could see the curve of the Earth and cross the Atlantic in about three and a half hours.

At the same minute, British Airways took off from Heathrow for Bahrain and Air France from Paris for Rio de Janeiro by Dakar. The United States had not yet let Concorde land.