February 17

After eight years in the Inquisition’s prisons, the Dominican who preached an infinite universe of countless worlds was burned alive in the Campo de’ Fiori, his tongue gagged. He was condemned chiefly for theological heresies; a statue of him has stood on the spot since 1889.

Thomas Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr each had 73 electoral votes, since electors could not mark which was meant for president. The House, voting by state, chose Jefferson on the 36th ballot.

A hand-cranked Confederate submarine rammed a torpedo into the blockading sloop off Charleston: the first submarine to sink a warship. The Hunley never came back; her crew of eight was found inside when she was raised in 2000.

On 17 February 1869 by the Russian calendar, 1 March in the West, Dmitri Mendeleev put off a trip to inspect cheese dairies to finish a table of the 63 known elements by atomic weight and chemical likeness. He sent “An Attempt at a System of Elements” to the printer that day. It left gaps for…

Scott had meant to lay his main depot at 80° south. To spare the failing ponies he stopped at 79°29′, 31 nautical miles short, against Oates’s advice to push on and kill the ponies for food. The depot held about a ton of stores.

Petty Officer Edgar Evans, the strongest man in the party on the way out, had been failing since the Pole after frostbite and falls. He collapsed near the foot of the Beardmore Glacier and died that night. Wilson thought he had injured his brain in a fall.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art put about 1,300 works in a National Guard armory and showed Americans Matisse, Picasso and Kandinsky. The butt of the jokes was Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, “an explosion in a shingle factory” to one critic. The show moved on to Chicago…

In the centenary year of Brazil’s independence, the Semana de Arte Moderna filled the lobby of the Theatro Municipal with about 100 works, and the stage with poetry and music on three evenings. Anita Malfatti, Di Cavalcanti, Mário and Oswald de Andrade and Heitor Villa-Lobos took part. Brazilian…

Adopted by the Grand National Assembly this day; in force from 4 October. Translated largely from the Swiss civil code, it replaced Islamic family law: it banned polygamy, made marriage a civil contract, let a wife sue for divorce on the same grounds as her husband, and gave daughters equal shares…

Irène Curie and Frédéric Joliot had reported in January that radiation from beryllium knocked protons out of paraffin, and took it for gamma rays. Chadwick showed it was a neutral particle as heavy as a proton, and dated his letter to Nature 17 February; it appeared on the 27th. Uncharged, the…

Two songs about Liverpool childhoods, the first fruits of the studio years. Martin joined two takes of “Strawberry Fields” in different keys and tempos by changing the speed of both until they met. It was the first single since “Please Please Me” to miss number one: Engelbert Humperdinck’s…

Beetle number 15,007,034 made it the best-selling car ever built to that time, beating the Model T’s record, which had stood since 1927.

Geologists looking for hot springs on the rift took Alvin down 2,500 m and found warm water shimmering out of the rock, ringed with giant clams, mussels and tube worms. There was no biologist on the expedition. The animals live on bacteria that draw energy from hydrogen sulphide, not sunlight:…

A six-game match for the Association for Computing Machinery’s fiftieth anniversary. Kasparov lost the first game, then won three and drew two to take the match 4–2.

After a missed first attempt in 1998, it became the first spacecraft to orbit an asteroid, 433 Eros, on Valentine’s Day 2000. It was renamed for the planetary geologist Gene Shoemaker, who died in 1997.

After five months of searching for a private buyer, Darling announced that the government would take the bank over. A law passed within four days of the announcement gave the Treasury the power; the shares passed to the state on 22 February.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, about 787 billion dollars of tax cuts and spending, signed at a science museum rather than in Washington.