4 maggio

On his way home from Worms, Luther was “kidnapped” by men of his protector, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. He grew a beard, lived as “Junker Jörg”, and translated the New Testament from Greek into German in about eleven weeks.

A cavalry officer seized Mysore and built the most modern army in India, fighting the Company in four wars. Its iron-cased rockets so impressed the British that William Congreve copied them.

Company troops stormed the capital of Mysore, and Tipu Sultan died defending it. His mechanical tiger, mauling a European soldier, went on show at East India House. It is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Company stormed Tipu’s island fortress; he was found dead in a gateway. His mechanical tiger, mauling a European soldier, went to London and is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Grant crossed the Rapidan and never turned back. Seven weeks of almost daily fighting, each battle ending with a march around Lee’s right flank, brought the armies to Petersburg at a cost of more than 50,000 Union casualties.

Richard Taylor gave up the Confederate forces in Alabama, Mississippi and eastern Louisiana, the last Confederate army east of the Mississippi.

At Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Laboratory, his cousin Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter replaced tinfoil with wax, which a stylus engraved cleanly instead of denting. Recordings got clearer and lasted, and the patent pushed Edison back into a field he had left for the electric light.

The landlady at Bistritz begs him not to go: “It is the eve of St. George’s Day.” She gives him her rosary with the words “For your mother’s sake”, and he, an English Churchman who thinks such things idolatrous, keeps it round his neck. St George’s Day fell on 23 April by the Julian calendar,…

Ten years from the handover of the French works to the first official transit. The United States spent about $375 million, including $40 million to the French company and $10 million to Panama, the most it had ever spent on one project.

A new company took over the concession, largely to preserve something the old company’s creditors could sell. It kept a few thousand men digging at Culebra and, after asking $109 million, sold everything to the United States for $40 million.

In the French company’s offices on the plaza, Lieutenant Mark Brooke of the Army Corps of Engineers accepted the property. The $40 million was paid through J. P. Morgan & Co., then the largest real-estate transaction in history.

Thirteen riders from the Congress of Racial Equality left Washington on two buses to test Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which had outlawed segregated bus terminals. More than 400 riders followed that summer, and over 300 were jailed in Jackson, many in Parchman penitentiary. The Interstate Commerce…

At 12:24 in Ohio, National Guardsmen fired 67 shots in 13 seconds into students protesting the Cambodian incursion. Four were killed and nine wounded. Eleven days later police killed two students at Jackson State in Mississippi.

Between Pioneer Venus 2 and Magellan the United States launched nothing to the planets. Budgets went to the Space Shuttle, NASA sent nothing to Halley’s Comet, and Galileo waited on the ground after the Challenger disaster. The Voyagers kept the American flag flying.

The first planetary probe launched from the Space Shuttle. From orbit its radar mapped 98 percent of Venus through the clouds. At the end it was flown down into the atmosphere to learn how it dragged.

After three days at the prime ministers’ old residence in Cape Town, the two sides agreed to work towards the release of political prisoners and the return of exiles. In August, in the Pretoria Minute, the ANC suspended its armed struggle.

Deep Blue declined a tempting pawn grab and played like a human positional player. Kasparov resigned, then accused IBM of human help; analysts soon found he could have drawn by perpetual check in the final position.