30 september

K. 620, a German opera for Emanuel Schikaneder’s suburban theatre, with Schikaneder himself as Papageno and Constanze’s sister Josepha Hofer as the Queen of the Night. A week in, Mozart wrote to Constanze that the house was full again and “what pleases me most is the silent approval”.

A German Singspiel for Emanuel Schikaneder’s suburban theatre, with Schikaneder himself as the bird-catcher Papageno. Mozart conducted the first nights; he was dead two months later.

Mina asks to meet Renfield, and Seward takes her to him. The patient swallows his flies and spiders to tidy up, then says: “You’re not the girl the doctor wanted to marry, are you? You can’t be, you know, for she’s dead.” When she says she and her husband are staying with Dr. Seward, he answers…

Mr. Harker arrives at Purfleet at nine, uncommonly clever and full of energy, “the quiet, business-like gentleman”. Seward admires “that going down to the vault a second time”. After lunch he hears the typewriter clicking: the Harkers are knitting “every scrap of evidence” into chronological order.

At King’s Cross and at Carter Paterson’s office Jonathan checks the tally, and the carriers’ men describe Carfax and its old chapel. He is now satisfied that all fifty boxes went into the old chapel at Carfax, unless some “have since been removed”, as he fears from Seward’s diary. By evening he…

Two hours after dinner they meet in Dr. Seward’s study and “unconsciously formed a sort of board or committee”. Mina is asked to be secretary, and all six take hands over a golden crucifix to make a “solemn compact”. Van Helsing then lists the vampire’s powers and limits: he casts no shadow and no…

Mina, who saw Jonathan leave for Whitby “with as brave a face as I could”, is glad: he comes back “full of life”. When Lord Godalming and Mr. Morris arrive early, she meets them alone; they do not know she knows what they asked Lucy.

Serbia threw back three Austro-Hungarian invasions in 1914, then fell in the autumn of 1915 to a German, Austrian and Bulgarian attack. An Allied army of French, British, Serbian, Italian, Russian and Greek troops held a line north of Salonika for three years that Germans mocked as their largest…

Britain, France and Italy agreed in the small hours that Germany could annex the Sudetenland; Czechoslovakia was not at the table. Back in London Chamberlain spoke from Downing Street of “peace for our time”. Germany occupied the rest of Czech lands in March 1939.

Ten days after the Germans took Kyiv, a detachment of Einsatzgruppe C with German police and local auxiliaries shot 33,771 Jews in a ravine on the edge of the city in two days. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum counts about 2 million Jews murdered in such mass shootings.

When the Soviet Union blocked the roads and railways into West Berlin, American and British aircraft fed the city of two million by air, flying in more than 2.3 million tons of food and coal. At the peak an aircraft landed every few minutes.

From high on Pumori, Shipton and Hillary looked straight up the Western Cwm. Its floor rose higher than anyone had guessed, and from its head the Lhotse Face led up to the South Col. The route Mallory had dismissed in 1921 looked possible.

Auguste Piccard and his son Jacques took their new bathyscaphe, built in Trieste and Italian yards, to 3,150 m off Ponza, in the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Thousands of East Germans were camped in the mud of the West German embassy garden in Prague. From the balcony Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher began: “We have come to you to tell you that today your departure…”, and the roar of the crowd drowned out the rest.

Pioneer 10’s twin, retargeted after Jupiter to make the first flight past Saturn. Its routine mission ended in 1995 when it no longer had the power to run its instruments.

After a night of meetings in Government Buildings, the finance minister, Brian Lenihan, guaranteed the deposits and most debts of six Irish banks, some 440 billion euros, more than twice the size of the economy. The bill arrived in 2010.

Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton's neural network, trained on two gaming graphics cards, cut the error rate for recognising images from 26% to 15%. The margin convinced the field: within a few years almost every AI lab had moved to deep learning on GPUs.

Alex Krizhevsky, Ilya Sutskever and Geoffrey Hinton’s network, trained on two gaming graphics cards, got the top-5 error rate down to 15.3%, against 26.2% for the next entry. Within a few years nearly every computer-vision lab had switched to deep learning on GPUs.

A ten-year chase to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, then two years alongside it as it swung past the Sun. The mission ended with a controlled crash onto the comet, sending pictures until the last moment.