12 september

14 July to 12 September 1683, Rajab to Ramadan 1094 in the hijri calendar. Kara Mustafa Pasha’s mines had nearly breached the walls when a relief army under King Jan III Sobieski of Poland came down the Kahlenberg, its winged hussars in the lead, and routed the besiegers in an afternoon.

Lucy loves “that dear Dr. Van Helsing” and, for the first time in weeks, is not afraid to be alone: “I shall not mind any flapping outside the window.” She feels comfort from the flowers already.

Cecil Rhodes, who died before it was built, wanted a Cape-to-Cairo railway and a bridge close enough to the falls for the spray to reach the trains. The steel arch crosses the Zambezi gorge about 128 metres above the river. The line to Cairo was never finished.

The impresario Emil Gutmann billed Mahler’s Eighth as the “Symphony of a Thousand”, and with two large choirs, a children’s choir and eight soloists the performers did number about a thousand. Thomas Mann was in the audience. Mahler conducted; he died eight months later.

Joffre’s French armies and the British turned on the German right wing east of Paris and forced it back to the Aisne. Paris taxis ferried a few thousand reinforcements to the front. The Schlieffen Plan had failed: there would be no quick victory in the west.

Belgium held the Games in a war-damaged country, without the defeated powers, who were not invited. The five-ring flag flew for the first time, an athlete took the first Olympic oath, and doves were released at the opening.

That morning The Times reported Rutherford calling atomic power “moonshine”. Waiting for a light to change on Southampton Row, by his own later account, Leo Szilárd saw that an element which absorbed one neutron and emitted two could sustain a chain reaction. He patented the idea in 1934 and…

Jack Kilby, new at Texas Instruments and working through the company's summer holiday, built a transistor, a capacitor and resistors from one piece of germanium. Months later Robert Noyce at Fairchild worked out how to make them flat, in silicon, with the wiring laid on top — the version the…

A day and a half after launch it struck the Moon near the crater Autolycus, the first human-made object to reach another world. It carried two balls of pentagonal metal pennants stamped with the Soviet emblem, and its spent upper stage hit the Moon shortly after.

Kennedy at Rice University, Houston: We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. In the same speech he asked: “Why does Rice play Texas?” Full text at the JFK Library.

Held in Port Elizabeth, he suffered a head injury under interrogation. Police then drove him, naked and unconscious in the back of a Land Rover, more than 1,000 kilometres to Pretoria, where he died on a cell floor. He was thirty. The minister of police, Jimmy Kruger, said his death “leaves me…

Built to patch Valve’s own games. When Half-Life 2 required it in November 2004 players were furious, but by selling other publishers’ games as well it became the store where most PC games are bought.

For two and a half days the heads of Wall Street’s banks sat in the New York Fed trying to find a buyer for Lehman. Paulson had told them there would be no public money this time.

Thirteen months in which banks stopped trusting one another. Nobody knew who held the bad mortgage securities, so lending between banks dried up and central banks had to stand in for the market with new lending facilities, one after another.

Friday, about 6 p.m. Paulson, Tim Geithner of the New York Fed and Christopher Cox of the SEC told the chief executives to work out a private solution. They split them into teams to value Lehman’s property assets and to plan for its failure.