3 januari

“The end of the tent government”: fifteen years from Perry’s arrival to the fall of the shogunate, in which the treaties, assassinations and the rallying cry sonnō jōi, “revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”, broke two and a half centuries of Tokugawa rule.

With Satsuma troops at the palace gates, the court proclaimed the shogunate abolished and rule restored to the fifteen-year-old emperor Mutsuhito. That night a council demanded that Yoshinobu give up his lands as well. Japanese calendar: Keiō 3, 12th month, 9th day

The last shōgun, modernising his army with French advisers, held the title for less than a year. He lived quietly in Shizuoka afterwards, photographing and cycling, and outlived the Meiji emperor, dying in 1913.

Lick’s great refractor sees first lightLick Observatory

James Lick, a piano-maker turned San Francisco landlord, left $700,000 for a telescope more powerful than any yet made. His 36-inch refractor crowned the first mountaintop observatory staffed all year, and Lick himself is buried under its pier.

Its twin, Mariner 1, was blown up minutes after launch on 22 July 1962 when its guidance failed. Its identical twin Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to work at another planet, and found Venus far too hot for the jungles of science fiction.

For the first time, the magazine's Man of the Year cover went to something that wasn't a person: the personal computer.

The first block of the chain carries a headline from that day’s The Times: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”. It proves the block was made no earlier, and reads as a manifesto. Its 50-bitcoin reward can never be spent.

Feng Zhang’s team at the Broad Institute, and George Church’s at Harvard in the same issue, showed that Cas9 edits human and mouse cells. Berkeley and the Broad then fought for years over the patents.

The first landing on the far side, in Von Kármán crater, talking to Earth through the relay satellite Queqiao. Its rover Yutu-2 found what may be material from the Moon’s mantle.