August 30

The Yankton, a Dakota people, met them in friendship and smoked with them for two days. Their chiefs took the medals, then told the captains plainly that the gifts were poor and that their people needed traders, guns and powder. The interpreter Pierre Dorion stayed behind to bring a delegation to…

Jackson held John Pope’s army on the old battlefield while Longstreet came up and smashed its flank. 22,180 casualties (NPS), and the Confederates were free to invade the North.

Wagner’s own theatre, built for his works alone, opened with the first complete Ring of the Nibelung: four evenings, given three times. The orchestra played unseen in a covered pit. Kaiser Wilhelm I, Liszt, Bruckner, Grieg and Tchaikovsky, writing for a Moscow paper, came; the festival ended deep…

Lucy writes that she has quite given up walking in her sleep, that Arthur is with her and that the strong air has restored her. “We are to be married on 28 September.” The letter is headed Whitby, though her own diary puts her at Hillingham from 24 August, and it sits oddly with the letters and…

The beach at Cape Valentine flooded at high tide, so they moved seven miles west to a spit named after Frank Wild. Twenty-two men lived there for four and a half months under the two upturned boats, with a blubber stove, Hussey’s banjo, and Wild in command.

At 11.40 a.m. Worsley spotted the snowed-over camp. Shackleton called from the boat, “Are you all well?” and Wild answered, “We are all well, boss.” All twenty-two were aboard within an hour, after four and a half months on the island.

Lou Ottens’s team at Philips in Hasselt, Belgium, put tape in a box small enough for a jacket pocket and showed it at the Berlin Radio Exhibition. Philips then licensed the design free of charge to any maker who kept to the standard, and the cassette beat every rival tape cartridge.

The Moscow–Washington hotlineMoscow–Washington hotline

Set up after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was never a red telephone but a pair of teleprinters, on a cable through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki with a radio backup. The first test message was “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’s back 1234567890.”

The hotline opensMoscow–Washington hotline

In October 1962 letters had taken hours to cross between the two leaders. The new Direct Communications Link was not a red telephone but a pair of teletype terminals, joined by cable through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Helsinki. The first test message: “THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE…

The lawyer who had argued Brown became the Court’s first Black justice, confirmed by the Senate 69 to 11. He served until 1991.

McCartney’s song for Lennon’s five-year-old son Julian, seven minutes long when singles ran three. One of four singles that launched the band’s own Apple label, it spent nine weeks at number one in the United States.

STS-8 lifted off at 2:32 in the morning, the first night launch of the programme, and landed at night at Edwards six days later. Bluford, an Air Force pilot, had flown 144 combat missions in Vietnam.

OV-103, the most-flown spacecraft in history: 39 missions and a year in orbit. It launched Hubble, flew both return-to-flight missions, and took John Glenn back to space at 77.

After a 1994 proposal that reshuffled the labs' own choices and was rejected by the American Chemical Society, IUPAC's General Assembly adopted rutherfordium, dubnium, seaborgium, bohrium, hassium and meitnerium. Dubna got its name and Seaborg kept his; kurchatovium, hahnium, nielsbohrium and…

IUPAC and IUPAP set up a Transfermium Working Group to judge the rival claims to elements 101–109. Its rulings, and IUPAC's attempt to impose names of its own, set Berkeley, Dubna and Darmstadt against the referee as well as each other.