25 maart

The feast of the Annunciation, and so Florentine New Year’s Day: Santa Maria del Fiore was dedicated on the first day of the year 1436. Guillaume Du Fay wrote the motet Nuper rosarum flores for the ceremony.

Dated 25 March, Lady Day and the first day of the English year; the clerk first wrote January and struck it out. It leaves his wife “my second best bed with the furniture”, and 26s 8d each to three fellow actors for mourning rings: Burbage, Heminges and Condell.

Christiaan Huygens and his brother Constantijn ground their own lenses. With a twelve-foot telescope of about 50 powers Christiaan found a moon of Saturn, and went on to explain the planet’s odd “ears”: a thin, flat ring that touches it nowhere.

The Commons had voted 283 to 16 on 23 February. From 1 May no ship could clear from a British port for the trade, and from 1 March 1808 no captive could be landed in a British colony. The act ended the trade, not slavery.

Twenty years of petitions, pamphlets, boycotts and Commons debates. In 1792 alone 519 petitions reached Parliament, the most ever on one subject.

The horse-drawn Oystermouth Railway along Swansea Bay began carrying passengers for a fare: the first passenger railway service in the world. Horses pulled it until steam took over in 1877.

A retired Osaka police official who had sold his books to feed the starving in the Tenpō famine led his students and poor townsmen against the city’s officials. The rising was put down in a day, but the fires it started burned a fifth of Osaka. Japanese calendar: Tenpō 8, 2nd month, 19th day

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Paris typesetter, copied the ear: a horn and a membrane moved a bristle that traced sound waves onto paper blackened with lamp soot, wrapped around a hand-cranked cylinder. It was built to see sound, not to hear it again: nobody, Scott included, thought of…

In 1881 the jangadeiros, the raft men of Fortaleza’s beach led by Francisco José do Nascimento, had refused to carry enslaved people out to the ships taking them south. Three years later Ceará became the first Brazilian province to free all its slaves.

Greek Independence Day by the Julian calendar Greece still used: 25 March, which was 6 April in Paris. About 240 men from fourteen nations competed in a stadium rebuilt in marble on its ancient site. The first champion was an American, James Connolly, in the triple jump.

Enrico Fermi, Edoardo Amaldi, Franco Rasetti, Emilio Segrè, Oscar D’Agostino and Bruno Pontecorvo turned Joliot’s method on neutrons and went through the periodic table element by element. The group broke up as Mussolini’s racial laws arrived, and Fermi left for Stockholm on 6 December 1938.

Harold Ewen and Edward Purcell pointed a plywood horn antenna out of a window of Harvard’s physics laboratory and caught the faint radio line of cold hydrogen gas, predicted in 1944. It lets astronomers map the Milky Way’s spiral arms, which dust hides from ordinary light.

His ban had lapsed, and he walked on as the surprise speaker at the All-in African Conference. It demanded a national convention before South Africa became a republic, or a national strike. Four days later the Treason Trial ended, and he did not go home.

In Dallas County, Alabama, Black residents were a majority of the population but only about 2 percent of registered voters. SNCC had worked there since 1963; King opened the SCLC campaign at Brown Chapel AME Church, and Sheriff Jim Clark answered with mass arrests.

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — King, at the state capitol Under federal protection, about 3,200 set out along U.S. 80; a court limited them to 300 on the two-lane stretch through Lowndes County. By the capitol steps they were about…

A Detroit mother of five, 39, who had driven south to help, was shot dead by Klansmen from a passing car on U.S. 80 while ferrying marchers back to Selma. One of the four men in the car was an FBI informant.

ESO opens La SillaLa Silla Observatory

Western Europe’s astronomers pooled their money as the European Southern Observatory and went looking for the dark, dry skies their continent lacks. La Silla, 2,400 metres up at the edge of the Atacama, was the first of ESO’s mountains in Chile; its 3.6-metre telescope followed in 1976.

South Vietnamese divisions drove down Route 9 toward Tchepone to cut the Trail. Congress had barred American ground troops from Laos, so their advisers stayed behind and only the helicopters and bombers went in. The retreat under fire became a rout, and the test of Vietnamization failed.

Troops and families left Pleiku down a neglected road to the coast. The column, joined by tens of thousands of civilians, was ambushed again and again; only a fraction reached Tuy Hòa. The Vietnamese who lived it call it the convoy of tears.

James Cameron went down alone in a 7-metre sub that dropped upright like a torpedo, taking 2 h 36 min to reach the bottom. A hydraulic leak and failing thrusters cut his time there to about three hours, and the ascent took only 70 minutes. Local time 05:15 to noon.

The first solo dive to the Challenger Deep, at 10,908 m on his own gauge. He found a flat, featureless plain of silt and few animals bigger than an inch.

Between Trieste leaving the bottom and James Cameron landing on it, no one went down to the Challenger Deep. More people walked on the Moon in that time than visited it. Only two robots, Kaikō and Nereus, reached the bottom.