February 20

Darwin felt it lying in a wood near Valdivia. At Concepción two weeks later he found the town in ruins, and on nearby Santa María island FitzRoy measured beds of mussels lifted clear of the tide by several feet: mountains, it seemed, were raised a quake at a time. A bad earthquake at once destroys…

Published in Copenhagen under the pseudonym Victor Eremita, it sets the pleasure-seeker’s papers beside a judge’s letters on duty and leaves the reader to choose. Truth, for Kierkegaard, is to be lived, not system-built.

Tchaikovsky’s first ballet, choreographed by Julius Reisinger, was judged weak. The version danced today is the 1895 revival by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov in St Petersburg, two years after the composer’s death. The date was 4 March in the Gregorian calendar.

Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini painted speed, noise and crowds in Milan. The band ends in 1916, when Umberto Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia both died in the war the movement had cheered for, the usual end of its first phase; Marinetti led a second Futurism into the…

An Italian poet launched an Italian movement on the front page of a Paris daily. A racing car, Marinetti wrote, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace; museums are cemeteries; and war is “the world’s only hygiene”.

Knut Haukelid’s charge holed the rail ferry carrying the last heavy water across Lake Tinnsjø, and she sank in deep water. Fourteen Norwegians and four German soldiers aboard were killed.

Norsk Hydro’s plant at Vemork was the world’s only large-scale source of the heavy water the German reactors needed. It began with four Norwegian commandos parachuted onto the Hardanger plateau on 18 October 1942 and ended with a ferry on the bottom of Lake Tinnsjø.

Three orbits in 4 h 55 min. A sensor said his heat shield had come loose, so Glenn re-entered with the retrorocket pack strapped over it and watched it burn away past the window. The sensor was faulty.

Beijing became the first city to hold both Summer and Winter Games, reusing the Bird’s Nest for the ceremonies, with snow for the ski events made almost entirely by machine.