16 april

Three locomotives, Sultan, Sindh and Sahib, hauled fourteen carriages and about 400 guests 34 kilometres from Bori Bunder, to a public holiday and a 21-gun salute. Built by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, it began what became one of the largest rail networks in the world.

Fourteen carriages carrying about 400 guests left Bori Bunder in Bombay for Thane, 34 kilometres, to a 21-gun salute. By 1900 India had one of the largest railway networks in the world.

Lincoln signed the District of Columbia’s emancipation act, freeing more than 3,100 people and paying their owners up to $300 each. It was the only compensated emancipation the United States ever carried out.

A day of fragments relayed by wireless, some of them false: rumours that all were saved and that Titanic was under tow to Halifax ran in the evening papers.

General Nivelle promised to break through on the Chemin des Dames in two days, and sent in Senegalese tirailleurs among the first waves. It failed, and by June soldiers in dozens of French divisions refused to attack. Pétain replaced him and calmed the army with leave, rest and a few dozen…

Zhukov’s and Konev’s fronts, some two and a half million men, attacked across the Oder and encircled the city. Its garrison surrendered on 2 May, the day Yevgeny Khaldei photographed a Red Army flag over the Reichstag.

To show what the airlift could do, General William Tunner ordered an all-out push over Easter: 12,941 tons in 1,398 flights in 24 hours, a plane landing in Berlin about once a minute. Four weeks later the blockade was lifted.

Of ovarian cancer, at 37. She had left King’s in 1953 for Birkbeck, where she worked out much of the structure of tobacco mosaic virus. Nobel prizes are not awarded after death, so she could not share the one of 1962.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. — King Arrested on Good Friday, 12 April, King answered eight white clergymen who had called the protests “unwise and untimely”. He wrote in the margins of a newspaper and on scraps smuggled out by his lawyers.

On 1 February two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in a garbage truck. Some 1,300 Black sanitation workers walked out, carrying placards that read “I AM A MAN”. The city recognised their union on 16 April, twelve days after King’s death.

To save power the guidance platform was off, so for a 14-second course correction the crew held the line between day and night on the Earth in the crosshairs of the window sight and flew the burn by hand.

Indonesia set up an agency for the reconstruction, the BRR, under Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, with a four-year mandate. By its close in April 2009 more than 134,000 houses had been rebuilt, with schools, clinics, roads and ports.

DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first work outside classical music and jazz to take it. The board called it a collection of songs capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.

President Macron promised a rebuilding in five years. The roof and spire were remade as they had been, in oak shaped by hand, from about a thousand trees felled in French forests, and the lead dust was cleaned from every surface inside.