December 8

Samuel Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian, had $50,000 from the War Department to build a flying machine. Launched by catapult from a houseboat, it broke up at once and dropped into the icy river; the pilot, Charles Manly, was fished out. It was the second failure in two months. Nine days later…

Silvered glass, pioneered by Léon Foucault in the 1850s, made mirrors that could grow far larger than any lens. From George Ellery Hale’s 60-inch on Mount Wilson in 1908, the largest telescope on Earth was a single mirror: the Hooker, then the Hale, then the Soviet six-metre, until mirrors made of…

In the afternoon the Norwegians passed 88°23′ S, where Shackleton had turned back in January 1909, 97 nautical miles from the Pole. They laid their last depot at 88°25′.

Five weeks after von Spee’s squadron sank two British cruisers off Coronel, Chile, two British battlecruisers caught it off the Falklands and sank Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Von Spee went down with both his sons in the squadron.

The first great international tournament in the Soviet Union, run by the state as a showcase. Efim Bogoljubov won ahead of Lasker and Capablanca, and Vsevolod Pudovkin filmed the comedy Chess Fever around it, with Capablanca playing himself.

At a manor house in a Polish village, the SS began to murder Jews from the surrounding region in gas vans: the first of the killing centres. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum counts at least 152,000 people killed there.

Roosevelt asked Congress for war in a speech of six and a half minutes: “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked.” Only one member of Congress, Jeannette Rankin, voted against.

The first Games in the southern hemisphere, and the first boycotts: the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland over the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon over Suez. At the close, the athletes walked in together rather than by nation for the first time.

The INF TreatyIntermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty

In the East Room of the White House, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the first treaty to abolish a whole class of nuclear weapons: every land-based missile with a range from 500 to 5,500 kilometres. By 1991, 2,692 had been destroyed.

In Inner Mongolia, big QJ 2-10-2s still hauled coal over the Jingpeng Pass, and railway enthusiasts came from around the world to watch. Diesels took over in December 2005, 180 years after Locomotion No. 1. Some of the QJs went to railroads in the United States.

China and Nepal jointly announced a new height, 8,848.86 metres, measured to the snow surface. The survey of the 1850s had said 29,002 feet (8,840 metres); the Survey of India’s 29,028 feet (8,848 metres), from 1955, was the figure for the next sixty-five years.

The genome of the new coronavirus was posted online on 11 January 2020. Eleven months later an mRNA vaccine was going into arms outside a trial, a job that had taken years or decades for every earlier vaccine.

Margaret Keenan, 90, was given the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine in Coventry, the first dose of an approved COVID-19 vaccine anywhere. It was eleven months after the genome was published.

At University Hospital Coventry, Margaret Keenan, 90, a week short of her 91st birthday, was the first person to receive an authorised COVID-19 vaccine outside a trial. The second was a man of 81 called William Shakespeare.