February 1

From France’s declaration of war to Waterloo, with only a year’s truce. The war bought cannon and shot from the ironmasters, but blockades shut markets and bread prices soared, and the slump of 1811–12 fed the Luddite unrest.

Seven states in six weeks: South Carolina, then Mississippi (9 January), Florida (10 January), Alabama (11 January), Georgia (19 January), Louisiana (26 January) and Texas (1 February): the cotton South. Mississippi’s declaration was blunt: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the…

Germany’s admirals calculated that sinking every ship in the war zone would starve Britain out before America could make a difference. Losses soared until the Allies adopted convoys that summer.

Oswald Avery, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty purified Griffith’s transforming principle and attacked it with enzymes one at a time. Protein-destroying enzymes left it working; a DNA-destroying one killed it. The gene was DNA, though many held out for protein, and Avery never won a Nobel.

Launched by von Braun’s Army team and built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. James Van Allen’s Geiger counter on board kept falling silent: it was saturated by radiation so intense that it revealed the Van Allen belts, the first discovery of the space age.

Four freshmen from North Carolina A&T, Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil and David Richmond, sat down at Woolworth’s whites-only lunch counter and stayed until closing. Sit-ins spread to dozens of Southern cities within weeks. When the store gave in on 25 July, the first Black…

Capitol had turned down four Beatles singles. It rushed this one out on 26 December 1963 after radio stations began playing imported copies, and it went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 a week before the band arrived.

About 25,000 people walked a corridor across East Texas and western Louisiana and found 84,000 pieces, some 38 percent of the orbiter by weight. Two searchers, Jules “Buzz” Mier and Charles Krenek, died when their helicopter crashed. Nobody on the ground was hurt by the debris.

From the deorbit burn over the Indian Ocean to break-up over Texas, sixteen minutes before the planned landing in Florida. Hot gas had entered the breach in the left wing and was melting its aluminium structure from inside.

Columbia met the top of the atmosphere, 120 kilometres up, over the Pacific. Within minutes sensors in the left wing were reading higher strain and temperature than on any earlier flight.

In Mission Control the maintenance officer reported four hydraulic temperature sensors in the left wing off-scale low. Over California people on the ground had already seen pieces shedding from the orbiter.

Roger, uh, bu— — Rick Husband Husband’s answer to a call about tyre-pressure readings was cut off mid-word. About 40 seconds later Columbia broke apart at some 60 kilometres over Texas, at eighteen times the speed of sound. All seven crew members died.

OV-102, the first orbiter to fly and the heaviest. 28 missions, among them the first Spacelab, the Chandra X-ray telescope and the fourth Hubble servicing. Too heavy to be useful for the International Space Station, it never docked with it or with Mir.

Twenty-nine months without a shuttle flight. The station’s crew fell to two and came and went by Soyuz.

The 2M partnership of Maersk and MSC ended, and Maersk teamed up with Hapag-Lloyd on a network that promised fewer port calls and better punctuality.