1 december

When Portugal's king died childless, Philip II of Spain took his throne. Both empires kept their own laws, but Spain's enemies now fell on Portugal's: the Dutch took much of Portuguese Asia in these sixty years.

Borrowing from the “disassembly” lines of Chicago’s meatpackers, Ford pulled chassis past workers who each did one task. The time to build a Model T chassis fell from more than 12 hours to about an hour and a half.

As Congress’s sole delegate he lodged at Kingsley Hall in the East End and took tea with George V in his dhoti. He claimed to speak for all India, untouchables included, and clashed with B. R. Ambedkar, who demanded separate electorates for them. The conference broke up without agreement.

Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met together for the first time. They agreed on a landing in France in May 1944, and Stalin promised to join the war against Japan once Germany was beaten.

Parks, a seamstress and secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, would not give up her seat on a Cleveland Avenue bus to a white passenger. She was arrested and, four days later, fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. That night Jo Ann Robinson of the Women’s Political Council mimeographed leaflets calling…

Blue capsules holding the 366 days of the year were drawn one by one on live television. The first drawn was 14 September: men born on that day, from 1944 to 1950, would be called up first.

Graham Fagg from England and Philippe Cozette from France shook hands through a hole in the service tunnel, the first land link between Britain and the Continent since the Ice Age. The two drives met a few centimetres out of line.

A 305-metre dish laid into a sinkhole in Puerto Rico’s karst hills, with a receiver platform of some 900 tons hung from cables above it. For 53 years the largest single-dish telescope in the world, it found the first binary pulsar, which won a Nobel Prize, and mapped asteroids by radar.

Two cables had failed in August and November, and the NSF had decided to take the telescope down safely. Before it could, the remaining cables gave way and the 900-ton platform fell into the dish.