21 ottobre

Months before the princes were ready, the preacher Peter the Hermit led tens of thousands of mostly poor pilgrims out of Cologne, down the Danube and to Constantinople, where Alexios ferried them across the Bosporus to be rid of them.

The Seljuk sultan Kilij Arslan ambushed Peter’s followers as they marched out of their camp while Peter was away in Constantinople. Byzantine ships rescued the survivors; most of the rest were killed or enslaved.

Tokugawa Ieyasu’s eastern army met Ishida Mitsunari’s western coalition in a narrow valley on the road between Kyoto and Edo. The battle turned at midday when Kobayakawa Hideaki and his 15,000 men changed sides; Ishida was captured and beheaded in Kyoto two weeks later. Japanese calendar: Keichō…

At the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, John Dalton read a paper on how water absorbs gases and ended it with a table of the relative weights of atoms, hydrogen being 1. His New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808) made atomic weight the number every later table was built on.

For nearly three centuries the working telescope was a lens at the end of a tube. A single lens bends each colour differently, so early refractors grew absurdly long to keep the blur down, until two-glass achromatic lenses arrived in the 1750s. The last of the giants was the 40-inch at Yerkes.

Yerkes Observatory is dedicatedYerkes Observatory

The streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes paid for a 40-inch lens by Alvan Clark & Sons, in a tube 19 metres long. To bring the eyepiece within reach, the whole floor of the dome rises and falls like a lift. It is still the largest refractor ever used for research: a bigger lens would sag under its own…

Playing soprano saxophone, Coltrane turned a waltz from The Sound of Music into a long modal vamp with McCoy Tyner on piano and Elvin Jones on drums, and the record sold like a pop hit.

General Walter Sweeney of Tactical Air Command told Kennedy that even a massive strike could not promise to destroy every missile. It settled the argument for the quarantine.