18 oktober

Its founders brought an organ, sermons in German and a shortened prayer book into the service; Hamburg’s rabbinical court condemned them the next year. The quarrel set the lines between Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Judaism.

In one room of the Grand Palais, built on the site of the demolished Palais de l’Industrie, hung Matisse’s Woman with a Hat and canvases by Derain and Vlaminck. The critic Louis Vauxcelles saw a demure classical sculpture among them and wrote “Donatello chez les fauves”: Donatello among the wild…

In Gorky’s paper Novaya Zhizn Kamenev set out their opposition to an uprising, telling everyone that one was planned. Lenin called them “strike-breakers” and demanded their expulsion.

Norsk Hydro’s plant at Vemork was the world’s only large-scale source of the heavy water the German reactors needed. It began with four Norwegian commandos parachuted onto the Hardanger plateau on 18 October 1942 and ended with a ferry on the bottom of Lake Tinnsjø.

William Higinbotham sketched it in a few hours and the technician Robert Dvorak built it in about three weeks, for Brookhaven’s annual visitors’ day: a ball bouncing over a net on a five-inch oscilloscope, driven by the lab’s analog computer, with a knob and a button on each of two hand-held…

Harry Bridges’ West Coast longshore union made a bargain the East Coast fought for years: employers could mechanize freely, in exchange for $29 million over five and a half years paid into a fund that guaranteed pay and paid early retirements.

Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko called on Kennedy at 17:00 and assured him that Soviet aid to Cuba was purely defensive. The photographs were in the room; Kennedy did not show them. Gromyko cabled Moscow that the situation was “completely satisfactory”.

The first probe to send data from inside another planet’s atmosphere. It found almost pure carbon dioxide and fell silent while still descending, crushed and cooked long before the ground. America’s Mariner 5 flew past the next day.

In the thin air Beamon broke the long jump world record by 55 centimetres, past the end of the optical measuring rail, so officials had to fetch a tape. The record stood for almost twenty-three years.

After the crash American shops wanted no more video games, so Nintendo dressed the Famicom as a toy: a grey box that took cartridges from the front like a VCR, and a robot, R.O.B., to put it in toy aisles. Nintendo stocked New York shops itself and let them pay only for what sold. A lockout chip…

After eighteen years in charge, Erich Honecker was pushed out by his own Politburo and replaced by his protégé Egon Krenz, who had defended Beijing’s June crackdown.

Its big dish antenna never unfolded, so everything it found came home through a small one at a trickle. It still showed that Europa probably hides a salt-water ocean, and at the end it was steered into Jupiter so it could never contaminate that ocean.