17 december

Timur beat the Tughluq army outside Delhi. Before the battle, his own court historians record, he had some 100,000 prisoners killed. His troops then sacked the city for days, and it took Delhi a century to recover.

Peasants and masterless samurai of Shimabara and Amakusa, many of them Christian and crushed by taxes, rose under a teenage leader, Amakusa Shirō. They held the ruined Hara Castle for months against a shogunate army; when it fell, nearly all of the defenders were killed. Japanese calendar: began…

Orville Wright flew 12 seconds and 120 feet; on the fourth flight that day Wilbur stayed up for 59 seconds. Sixty-five years later a scrap of the Flyer’s wing fabric went to the Moon with Neil Armstrong.

In ten years the aeroplane went from a 12-second hop to crossing the Channel and the Mediterranean. Most of it happened in France, where the Wrights’ secrecy left the field open until Wilbur came to Le Mans in 1908.

Orville released the restraining wire and flew 120 feet (37 metres) in 12 seconds, pitching up and down as he over-corrected. Into the headwind his speed over the ground was 6.8 miles an hour. Orville had set up his camera on a tripod, and John Daniels squeezed the bulb just as the Flyer lifted,…

A freezing morning and a wind of about 27 miles an hour, stronger than the brothers liked. They hung out a sheet to call the men of the Kill Devil Hills life-saving station, and five people came to watch: John T. Daniels, Adam Etheridge and Will Dough of the station, W. C. Brinkley and a boy,…

The same up-and-down path, a little longer: about 175 feet (53 metres). The brothers were taking turns, each learning a machine that nobody had flown before.

About 200 feet (61 metres) in 15 seconds. A gust lifted one wing and Orville brought the Flyer down to keep it from sliding sideways.

While the men talked over the fourth flight, a gust caught the Flyer and rolled it across the sand. Daniels, holding on, was tumbled inside it and bruised: the first person hurt in an aeroplane accident. The engine and ribs were broken, and the Flyer never flew again.

The real thing: 852 feet (260 metres) in 59 seconds. Wilbur settled into steady flight after the first few hundred feet before the Flyer pitched down into the sand, breaking the frame that held the front elevator.

Success four flights thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas. Orville wired his father, Bishop Milton Wright, from the weather station at Kitty Hawk. The…

Downhill and downwind, from cairn to cairn, the party averaged 22½ miles a day, picking up each depot and cairn they had left on the way out.

Before leaving, the Norwegians pitched a small spare tent and flew the flag and a Fram pennant above it. Inside, Amundsen left a letter to King Haakon and a note asking Scott to forward it, in case the Norwegians did not get home.

Killed in the small hours at Prince Felix Yusupov’s palace on the Moika by Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and the right-wing deputy Vladimir Purishkevich. Monarchists, not revolutionaries, killed the empress’s favourite, hoping to save the throne. His body was pulled from the Malaya Nevka…

Five Citroën cars on Kégresse caterpillar tracks, led by Georges-Marie Haardt and Louis Audouin-Dubreuil, made the first crossing of the Sahara by motor vehicle, from Touggourt in Algeria to Timbuktu. It was a publicity stunt and a colonial project: France wanted motor links between its North and…

Douglas DC-3 first flightDouglas DC-3

Thirty-two years to the day after Kitty Hawk. The DC-3 was the first airliner that could make money carrying passengers alone, without a mail subsidy, and by the end of the decade it carried most of America’s air travellers.

Eight weeks from a chemical result nobody could explain to its explanation in print. On the night of 17 December Hahn and Fritz Strassmann were sure their irradiated uranium contained barium, an element barely half its weight.

The revised election law gave the vote to women of 20. At the first election under it, on 10 April 1946, 39 women won seats in the House of Representatives, a number not matched again until 2005.

For decades the Smithsonian credited Langley’s failed Aerodrome as the first machine capable of flight, so Orville lent the Flyer to the Science Museum in London in 1928. After the Smithsonian retracted in 1942 and Orville died in January 1948, the Flyer was hung in Washington on the 45th…

Ceaușescu ordered the protests crushed and flew to Iran the next day. Army and security forces shot into the crowds; rumours that spread abroad of thousands dead proved far too high.

Biz Markie had sampled Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)” without permission. Judge Kevin Duffy opened his opinion with the commandment, granted an injunction and referred the case for criminal prosecution. From then on every sample had to be cleared, and the dense collages of the…

On the hundredth anniversary, before a crowd of about 35,000, an exact reproduction of the 1903 Flyer ran down its wooden rail in rain and too little wind and stopped in a muddy puddle. The pilot, Kevin Kochersberger, tried twice; the Wrights’ 27-mile wind was the one thing the replica could not…

A fruit seller in Sidi Bouzid, humiliated by an official, set himself alight outside the governor’s office. Protests were filmed on phones and posted to Facebook, where Al Jazeera picked them up and broadcast them back into Tunisia.

The day bitcoin futures opened on the CME in Chicago. A year later it was below 3,300 dollars, down more than 80 per cent; unlike tulips, it came back, past 60,000 in 2021.