15 luglio

The Fatimids of Egypt had taken Jerusalem from the Seljuks only the year before, and their governor Iftikhar al-Dawla had poisoned the wells outside. Timber from Genoese ships broken up at Jaffa built the siege towers.

Godfrey’s tower reached the north wall, and the crusaders killed people through the city and on the Haram. The toll is disputed: Fulcher of Chartres, who arrived in December, wrote that almost ten thousand died in the Temple; Ibn al-Athir, writing over a century later, more than seventy thousand…

About eighteen miles overland, with the canoes on carts of cut-down cottonwood wheels, through prickly pear that pierced their moccasins, heat, hail and grizzlies. What the captains had hoped would take days took a month.

Through the canyon Lewis called the Gates of the Rocky Mountains, past the Three Forks and up the Jefferson and the Beaverhead, the men dragging the canoes up shallows by hand. They needed Shoshone horses to cross the mountains, and had not yet seen a Shoshone.

At Cawnpore, as a British relief column drew near, the British women and children held in the Bibighar were killed and thrown into a well. It became the rallying cry for the British reprisals that followed.

Thorpe, of the Sac and Fox Nation, won the pentathlon and the decathlon by wide margins. In 1913 he was stripped of both for having played minor-league baseball for money. The IOC gave replicas back in 1983, thirty years after his death, and in 2022 named him sole champion again.

A New Zealand Rhodes scholar at Oxford, racing for Oxford and Cambridge against Princeton and Cornell. The American Bill Bonthron also ran under the old record and still lost. Three years later Lovelock won the Olympic 1500 metres in Berlin.

One year and nine months. The ban of 1932 meant he never raced again as an amateur to defend it.

Eleven months, the shortest reign between the wars.

Britain’s committee, named from a puzzling telegram of Bohr’s ending “Maud Ray Kent”, concluded that about 25 pounds of uranium-235 would equal 1,800 tons of TNT and could be ready by the end of 1943. Mark Oliphant flew to the United States that summer to press it on the Americans.

Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl grew bacteria on heavy nitrogen, moved them to light, and spun their DNA in caesium chloride. After one generation all of it was half-heavy: each new double helix keeps one old strand, just as the base pairing predicted.

The first close pictures of another planet showed a cratered, Moon-like surface and ended hopes of canals. Too impatient to wait for the processed image, JPL engineers coloured in the first one by hand from strips of printed numbers.

Passing 9,846 km above the surface, it took 21 pictures and part of a 22nd. They showed craters, like the Moon, and a thin air, and ended the last serious hopes of canals and vegetation.

Famicom launched in JapanNintendo Entertainment System

Nintendo’s Family Computer, designed under Masayuki Uemura, went on sale at ¥14,800 with ports of Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye. A faulty chip forced a recall that winter; after it, the Famicom outsold everything in Japan.

Third console generationNintendo Entertainment System

The 8-bit era, and Nintendo’s: its Famicom and NES took most of the market in Japan and North America, while Sega’s Master System did better in Europe and Brazil. The Famicom was made until 2003.

…if you have got a squirt gun in your pocket, you may have to take it out. If you have got a bazooka and people know you have got it, you may not have to take it out. — Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary He wanted open-ended power to lend to or invest in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He got it, and…

Croatia, a country of four million, reached the final after three extra-time games. Kylian Mbappé, 19, became the first teenager to score in a final since Pelé, and Didier Deschamps the third man to win as player and coach.

The first World Cup with video referees. Holders Germany lost to South Korea and went out in the group, the third holders in a row to do so, after Italy and Spain.