27 september

The wind turned and the fleet sailed as night fell. William of Poitiers says the ships anchored mid-Channel until a lantern at the duke’s masthead gave the signal to go on; at dawn his ship was alone, and he ate a hearty breakfast with spiced wine while the rest caught up.

A west wind carried the fleet up the coast to the Somme estuary, the shortest crossing to Sussex. Ships were wrecked on the way, and William had the drowned buried in secret to keep the news from the army. At Saint-Valery the saint’s relics were carried out in procession to pray for a south wind.

Seventy-four years after the first stone, the choir was consecrated and the shrine of the Three Kings carried in procession to the axial chapel. A temporary wall closed off the unbuilt west for more than five centuries.

Süleyman arrived late in the season after a march through rain, having left his heaviest guns behind. Three weeks of mines and assaults failed, and the army turned for home before the snow.

“An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes” called Africans “an heathenish, brutish and an uncertaine, dangerous kinde of people” and gave masters near-total power over them. Jamaica, Antigua and South Carolina modelled their own codes on it.

The Venetian capital of Crete held out for twenty-one years, one of the longest sieges in history. Francesco Morosini surrendered it on terms to the grand vizier Fazıl Ahmed Köprülü.

Charles II gave the company a monopoly of English trade with West Africa. Its governor was his brother James, Duke of York, and many of the people it bought were branded DY. It shipped more enslaved Africans than any other single institution in the history of the trade.

The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals. — Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, December 1789 France became the first country in Europe to make all its Jews equal citizens.

George Stephenson drove Locomotion No. 1 with a train of coal wagons and hundreds of passengers crowded into and on top of them. It was the first public railway to use steam locomotives, though for years most of its traffic was still pulled by horses.

George Stephenson drove Locomotion No. 1 with a train of coal wagons, and hundreds of passengers crowded into and on top of them. It was the first public railway to use steam locomotives, though for years most of its traffic was still pulled by horses.

After the funeral at noon they go into Lucy’s tomb at two in the afternoon, and the coffin that Seward saw empty the night before is not empty now. Van Helsing says he will not do what is to be done until Arthur has been told. Seward still half-resists, then asks how the “bloody work” will be done.

Van Helsing leaves a note for Seward at the Berkeley in case he should not return from his night watch in the churchyard. If he does not return, Seward is to take his papers and the diaries of Harker and “find this great Un-Dead, and cut off his head and burn his heart or drive a stake through it,…

A three-page afterthought: if a body gives off the energy L as radiation, “its mass diminishes by L/V²”. He wrote V for the speed of light, and the letters E = mc² appear nowhere in his 1905 papers. He suggested testing it on radium salts.

Germany, Italy and Japan signed in Berlin a pact of mutual help against any power not yet in the war, which meant the United States. Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria joined later.

B. R. Ambedkar, the law minister, resigned this day after Nehru’s government shelved his Hindu Code Bill in the face of opposition in Parliament and in the street. After the 1951–52 election Nehru passed it in four separate acts: marriage in 1955, then succession, guardianship, and adoption and…

President Mitterrand opened the line on 22 September, and the public rode it five days later at 260 kilometres an hour. In February a test train had reached 380 kilometres an hour. Within a few years the train had taken most of the Paris–Lyon travel from the airlines.

Richard Stallman announced a complete Unix-compatible operating system that anyone could use, share and change. Eight years later Linux supplied the missing kernel, and the free system he described existed.

A cheap lander with a microwave-oven-sized rover, Sojourner. Its pictures drew record traffic to NASA’s young website, and its airbag landing was reused for Spirit and Opportunity.

Ion engines let it do what no craft had done: orbit two worlds beyond the Earth and Moon, the giant asteroid Vesta from 2011 and the dwarf planet Ceres from 2015, where it found bright salt deposits in Occator crater.

TikTok announced one billion monthly users outside China, four years after its global launch.