30 maggio

On Möngke’s orders the Franciscan William of Rubruck argued religion with Muslims and Buddhists before three judges, with Nestorian Christians on his side. He thought he had won; nobody converted, and at the end everyone drank heavily.

She had signed an abjuration on 24 May and been sentenced to life in prison; days later she put on men’s clothing again, and was condemned as a relapsed heretic. She was burned in the Old Market square, aged about 19, and her ashes were thrown into the Seine.

The Duchess of Newcastle, a writer on natural philosophy, watched Boyle and Hooke’s experiments: the first woman at a meeting. Pepys was unimpressed. The Society elected no woman Fellow until 1945.

He had come back in February after nearly thirty years away and been crowned with laurel at the Comédie-Française. Refused a Christian burial in Paris, his body was driven out of the city at night to an abbey in Champagne. Rousseau died on 2 July, at Ermenonville.

Boiling off liquefied air fraction by fraction, Ramsay and Morris Travers found krypton (“hidden”) on 30 May, neon (“new”) in June and xenon (“stranger”) in July. Ramsay's young son suggested “novum” for the second; his father made it Greek.

His friend Hermann Kallenbach, a German-Jewish architect, bought 1,100 acres south-west of Johannesburg for the families of jailed satyagrahis. Gandhi had written to Leo Tolstoy, who replied that the Transvaal struggle was the most important work in the world then; he died ten weeks later.

On their summit attempt Wyn-Harris and Wager found an ice axe lying on the slabs below the North-East Ridge, east of the First Step. It was made in Täsch, in Switzerland, and is taken to be Irvine’s. It probably marks where the two men fell.

James Morris of The Times ran down to Base Camp and sent a runner to the Indian police radio post at Namche Bazaar with a coded message: “Snow conditions bad … advanced base abandoned … awaiting improvement”. In the code, it meant the summit had been reached by Hillary and Tenzing.

Chile kept the tournament after the 1960 Valdivia earthquake, the strongest ever recorded; its organiser Carlos Dittborn argued that because Chile had nothing, it had to do everything. Chile 2–0 Italy became the Battle of Santiago, with the police on the pitch. Its referee, Ken Aston, later…

It reached Mars in a planet-wide dust storm and waited it out. When the dust settled it mapped most of the planet, found the giant volcanoes and the canyon system now named Valles Marineris after it, and sent back 7,329 pictures.