19 december

Abel Tasman had sighted Tasmania in November. In Golden Bay, Māori in war canoes rammed a boat and killed four of his men. He named it Murderers' Bay and sailed on without landing.

There was no battle. About 12,000 soldiers built log huts and went short of food, clothing and shoes, and some 1,700 to 2,000 died of typhus, dysentery and other disease.

At “0,10”, billed as the last Futurist exhibition, Kazimir Malevich hung a black square on white high across a corner of the room: the place of an icon in a Russian home. He called the new art Suprematism. The date is Julian; Petrograd’s 19 December was 1 January 1916 in the West.

Hahn asked his exiled colleague for “some fantastic explanation”. He and Strassmann sent their paper on the 22nd; it appeared on 6 January 1939, cautiously worded, as chemists reporting what they could not believe as physicists.

A tape recorder on an Atlas rocket in orbit played President Eisenhower’s voice to the world: “America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere.” It was the first voice relayed from space.

Eleven crewed flights. Nine went to the Moon and six landed, and twelve men walked on it. No one has walked on it since.

Thieves took it from the offices of Brazil’s football confederation in Rio. It has never been found, and is thought to have been melted down for its gold.

Helmut Kohl spoke in front of the ruined Frauenkirche to a crowd waving West German flags and chanting “Germany, united fatherland”. He said afterwards that he knew then unification was coming.

Arising from the independent counsel’s inquiry into his relationship with a White House intern, the House approved perjury before a grand jury (228–206) and obstruction of justice (221–212). The Senate acquitted on 12 February 1999, 45–55 and 50–50.

After Congress refused to fund the car makers, Bush lent them 13.4 billion dollars from TARP to get through to the new administration: a bank rescue law stretched to cover industry.

The COP meant to replace Kyoto ended without a treaty. A short accord brokered by a few leaders, which the conference only “took note” of, said warming should stay below 2 °C and promised climate finance of 100 billion dollars a year by 2020.

ESA’s Gaia scanned the whole sky for over a decade, measuring positions, distances and motions for nearly two billion stars: the first true 3-D map of the Milky Way. It was switched off in March 2025.

The first crewed dive to the bottom of the Atlantic, at Brownson Deep north of Puerto Rico.

Victor Vescovo set out to dive the deepest point of each of the five oceans in Limiting Factor, a two-person Triton sub built to go to full ocean depth again and again. Its support ship mapped each trench with sonar before he went down.