31 ottobre

A sculptor who had hardly worked in fresco covered about 500 square metres with more than 300 figures, standing on a scaffold he designed, head tipped back, not lying down. He wrote a comic sonnet about the stiff neck and the paint dripping on his face.

Julius said vespers in the chapel on the eve of All Saints. Four years of work, and the pope lived less than four months to enjoy it.

A friar and professor in Saxony objected to the indulgence being preached to raise money for the new St Peter’s. He sent his theses to the archbishop of Mainz; whether he also nailed them to a church door is disputed.

On this day Martin Luther, a friar and professor at Wittenberg, sent his Latin theses against indulgences to Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz with a covering letter. Whether he also nailed them to the Castle Church door is disputed: the story was first told by Melanchthon after Luther’s death, though…

Martin Luther sent his theses against the sale of indulgences to the Archbishop of Mainz on 31 October. That he also nailed them to the Castle Church door is first told after his death and has been doubted since the 1960s. Within decades western Christianity had split into Catholic and Protestant…

The morning is bitterly cold, and the launch has passed few boats, none carrying a box of the size they seek. The crews fall on their knees and pray when the electric lamp is turned on them.

Mina records that she and Van Helsing arrived at Veresti at noon. At dawn he could hardly hypnotise her at all, and all she could say was “dark and quiet”. He buys a carriage and horses for the 70-odd miles before them, and they set out after dinner.

A cable from Bamfield, British Columbia, by Fanning Island, Fiji and Norfolk Island to Australia completed the All Red Line: a telegraph round the world that touched only British territory. Its first span, to Fanning Island, was the longest cable in the world.

Rome withdrew after Vesuvius erupted in 1906, and London built White City in ten months. The marathon was set at 26 miles 385 yards, from Windsor Castle to the royal box, the distance every marathon has run since 1921.

A sepoy of the 129th Baluchis, he kept his machine gun firing at Hollebeke after the rest of its crew was killed, and became the first Indian soldier to win the Victoria Cross. About 1.3 million Indians served overseas in the war.

At dusk, two regiments of the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade charged the Ottoman trenches on horseback and took the town’s wells before they could be blown, opening the way into Palestine.

An Indian Army force landed at Fao to guard the oil of the Persian Gulf and pushed up the Tigris towards Baghdad. It was fought mostly by Indian soldiers, and it ended with Britain holding what became Iraq.

It began with an Ottoman attempt on the Suez Canal and ended with British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian cavalry in Damascus and Aleppo. The water pipeline and railway the British laid across Sinai set the pace of the advance.

The Luftwaffe tried to destroy the RAF as a prelude to invasion. Fighter Command, guided by radar, held on. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. — Winston Churchill, 20 August 1940

The Luftwaffe tried to win control of the air over southern England before an invasion. Radar and a system of fighter control let the RAF meet the raids, and Hitler put the invasion off in September. Of the pilots Churchill said: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to…

The first hydrogen bomb vaporised the island of Elugelab at 07:15 local time on 1 November. In filter papers flown through the cloud, Albert Ghiorso's team at Berkeley found elements 99 and 100, made when uranium nuclei swallowed as many as 17 neutrons at once. Kept secret until 1955, they were…

Europe’s Nouveaux Réalistes and America’s Pop painters shared a gallery on 57th Street that had sold Abstract Expressionism. Rothko, Motherwell, Guston and Gottlieb left the gallery in protest: the changing of the guard, in one show.

Posted to a cryptography mailing list under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, whose identity is still unknown. The first block, mined on 3 January 2009, carried a newspaper headline about bank bailouts.

A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. — Satoshi Nakamoto Posted to a cryptography mailing list six weeks after Lehman Brothers failed. Its author has never been…