9 maggio

The English prince, the future Edward I, reached Acre with about a thousand men, too few to do more than raid. Often counted as the Ninth Crusade, it ended with a ten-year truce.

It began at a punishment parade at Meerut. Sepoys of the Bengal army mutinied over cartridges said to be greased with cow and pig fat, and peasants, landlords and deposed rulers across the north joined them. Both sides killed prisoners and civilians. British India called it the Mutiny; Indian…

A week after Vienna opened its World’s Fair, the stock exchange crashed and dozens of banks failed. The Gründerkrach spread to Berlin and, by September, across the Atlantic.

Two years after her eldest sister Zofia died of typhus. Afraid of passing on the disease, her mother had stopped kissing her children. Maria, ten, lost her faith in the Catholic Church with her.

Mina, an assistant schoolmistress, writes to Lucy that she practises shorthand and the typewriter so that, once she and Jonathan are married, she can be useful to him; he is keeping a stenographic journal of his travels. She has had only “a few hurried lines” from him. Lucy has not told her…

The Food and Drug Administration announced it would approve Searle’s Enovid, already sold for menstrual disorders, as a contraceptive. In 1965 the Supreme Court’s Griswold v. Connecticut struck down state bans on contraception for married couples.

The BBC staged the argument as a televised debate: Lighthill on one side, Donald Michie, John McCarthy and Richard Gregory on the other. It is a rare recording of the field’s founders defending it in public.

Japan’s ion-engined probe touched down twice on the asteroid Itokawa in November 2005. A fuel leak, dead reaction wheels and failing engines followed, and it limped home three years late.

The daily average of CO₂ at Mauna Loa went over 400 ppm for the first time, up from 315.7 in 1958 and about 280 before the industrial age. The IPCC later judged CO₂ to be higher than at any time in at least two million years.