14 mei

The cathedral works gave him a block of marble that Agostino di Duccio had started on and abandoned forty years before. Michelangelo, 26, carved a David 5.17 metres tall from it, in a walled-off yard behind the cathedral.

Edward Jenner took matter from cowpox sores on the hand of the milkmaid Sarah Nelmes and put it into two small cuts on the arm of James Phipps, eight, his gardener’s son. On 1 July he inoculated the boy with smallpox matter, and no disease followed.

Edward Jenner scratched matter from a cowpox sore on the hand of the dairymaid Sarah Nelmes into the arm of James Phipps, aged eight. When Jenner later inoculated him with smallpox, it did not take. The word comes from the Latin vacca, cow.

I set out at 4 oClock to the head of the first Island in the Missouri 6 Miles and incamped, on the Island — Clark The party had wintered on the Illinois side, on United States soil, while Upper Louisiana was formally handed over in St. Louis in March. Clark led the boats off in the rain; Lewis…

Against the current in a 55-foot keelboat and two pirogues, rowed, poled, sailed and hauled from the bank by towrope: about 1,600 miles in five and a half months. The river was already a trade road, run by St. Louis traders and by the nations who controlled its villages.

A squall caught the white pirogue, which carried the journals, the instruments and the medicine. Charbonneau, at the helm, panicked; the bowsman Cruzatte threatened to shoot him if he did not take the rudder. Sacagawea, with her baby, caught most of the things washing overboard. the Indian woman…

Four weeks with the Nez Perce, waiting for the snow on the Lolo Trail to melt. They returned most of the party’s horses, and Clark traded medical care for food, treating a line of patients each day. In council the Nez Perce agreed to the captains’ talk of peace and trade.

Against the spring flood, then overland on horses bought along the river. Food was short and thefts and quarrels with the river villages grew; east of the Cascades the party traded medicine and buttons for horses and roots.

Urged by Lyell, he began a vast book called Natural Selection. Wallace’s letter stopped it half-written. He then wrote an “abstract”, which became the Origin; in his autobiography he says it cost him thirteen months and ten days of hard labour.

Folded into the World’s Fair and spread over five and a half months, with no opening ceremony; some winners never knew they had been at the Olympics. The athletics were run on the grass of the Racing Club de France in the Bois de Boulogne, round a track that sloped and dipped.

On Mother’s Day a mob chased the Greyhound out of Anniston, slashed its tyres and threw a firebomb through a window; the riders were beaten as they escaped the smoke. The same afternoon Klansmen beat the Trailways riders in Birmingham’s bus station, where the police had agreed to stay away.

On a visit to Bulgaria, Khrushchev later recalled, he looked across the Black Sea towards Turkey, where American Jupiter missiles were being installed within range of Moscow, and thought of giving the Americans a taste of the same medicine from Cuba. It would also shield Castro from the invasion…

America’s first space station, built inside a spare Saturn V stage. Launch tore off its meteoroid shield and a solar wing; the first crew shaded it with a parasol pushed out through an airlock, and three crews lived aboard for 171 days in all.

Eighteen days after the explosion Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the country on television for the first time about the accident. He gave nine dead and 299 in hospital, and attacked the Western press.

China became the second country to drive a rover on Mars. Zhurong roamed for a year before going to sleep for the Martian winter, and did not wake up.