16 luglio

Cardinal Humbert laid a papal bull of excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia; Patriarch Michael Cerularius answered in kind days later. Behind it lay the filioque, leavened bread and the pope’s authority. The sentences were lifted in 1965, but the Catholic and Orthodox churches remain apart.

Cardinal Humbert, the pope’s legate, laid a bull excommunicating the patriarch Michael Keroularios on the altar of Hagia Sophia; the patriarch answered in kind. Few saw it as final then, and the excommunications were only lifted in 1965.

A German comic opera, K. 384, for Joseph II’s national Singspiel company, and his biggest success in his lifetime. The Emperor’s supposed verdict, “too many notes, my dear Mozart”, first appears in print in 1798, in Franz Xaver Niemetschek’s biography.

Small states got equal votes in the Senate, large states a House by population, in which an enslaved person counted as three-fifths of a person. It passed by one state.

A draft that let the rich buy out for $300 set off four days of riots, mostly by Irish working men, that turned into a pogrom against Black New Yorkers. Rioters lynched Black men and burned the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue; its 233 children escaped. The official toll was 119 or 120 dead.…

The first man is gone: Petrofsky, who took the larboard watch and did not go to his bunk. The men say they expected something of the kind but only that there is “something” aboard.

The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation promised to end British consular courts in Japan from 1899. The other powers followed, and with tariff autonomy in 1911 the last of the unequal treaties was gone.

A professional time the amateur record books never counted, and the target every amateur miler measured himself against until 1915.

Two years, one month and sixteen days.

Not a race but a time trial: three pacemakers were given handicap starts so that each could tow Taber through part of the distance. It worked by 0.15 seconds. An amateur had at last run faster than George, almost twenty-nine years on.

Eight years, through a war that stopped most European athletics.

Rain and lightning pushed the shot from 04:00 to 05:30 local time. At 05:10 Sam Allison began the count from the control bunker 10,000 yards south of the tower; observers lay face down with their feet toward it.

At minus 45 seconds Joseph McKibben threw the switch to the automatic timer. From then on only Hornig’s abort switch could stop it.

At 05:29 local time the Manhattan Project’s plutonium bomb was exploded on a tower in the New Mexico desert, with a yield of about 20 kilotons. Truman heard the news at Potsdam the next day.

05:29:45 Mountain War Time by the test report; later reconstructions give 05:29:21. The first nuclear explosion vaporised the tower and fused the desert sand into green glass. Los Alamos put the yield at about 21 kilotons of TNT; a 2021 reanalysis gave 24.8 kilotons. The Army called it an…

About 40 seconds after the flash the blast reached Base Camp. Fermi let small pieces of paper fall from about six feet; they landed some 2.5 metres away, which he reckoned meant ten thousand tons of TNT.

Brazil needed only a draw and scored first. Juan Schiaffino equalised and Alcides Ghiggia won it with eleven minutes left, before 173,850 paying spectators; with those let in free, estimates reach 200,000, the largest crowd a football match has ever had. Brazil never wore white again. The yellow…

Brazil built the Maracanã, then the largest stadium in the world, for it. There was no final: four teams played a closing group, and the fixture list happened to leave Brazil and Uruguay for last. England, at their first World Cup, went out in the first round.

LiftoffApollo 11

09:32 in Florida, from Launch Complex 39A. The Saturn V's first stage burned for 2 min 41 s and fell into the Atlantic 660 km downrange.

One and a half turns around the Earth at about 185 km, long enough to check every system before committing to the Moon.

Three days of coasting. To keep one side from baking and the other from freezing, the spacecraft turned slowly on its axis: the barbecue roll. One 3-second course correction was all it needed.

The third stage fired again for 5 min 47 s over the Pacific and left the spacecraft at 10.8 km/s, on course for the Moon.

Collins separated Columbia from the spent third stage, turned it around and docked nose to nose with Eagle, still stowed in the stage's top. The pair were pulled free at 17:49.

Spassky agreed to play in a small back room away from the cameras. Fischer won: his first win against Spassky in any game.

Twenty-one fragments of a comet torn apart by Jupiter’s gravity struck the planet over six days, leaving dark scars larger than Earth. They hit the side facing away from us; Galileo, still on its way, had the only direct view.

The FDA approved Truvada, taken daily by people without HIV, to prevent it. The iPrEx trial across six countries had found 44 per cent fewer infections overall, and far fewer among those who took the pill regularly.