January 22

Selim beat the last Mamluk sultan, Tumanbay, outside Cairo, and hanged him at the city’s Zuwayla Gate that April. Two and a half centuries of Mamluk rule ended, and Egypt’s grain and revenue went to Istanbul.

Jan van Leiden, Bernd Knipperdolling and Bernd Krechting were tortured with red-hot tongs and killed in the market place. Their bodies were hung in three iron cages from the tower of St Lambert’s Church. The cages still hang there.

About four and three-quarter hours, at just under a metre a second. Past 9,000 m a loud crack shook the craft: one of the outer Plexiglas panes of the entrance tunnel window had split. The sphere held, and they kept going.

Jacques Piccard and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the US Navy, in a steel sphere 2 m across under a float holding about 85,000 litres of petrol. The tug Wandank had towed Trieste out from Guam. Local time 08:23 to 16:56.

Pan Am’s New York to London flight left hours late after an engine overheated and the passengers were moved to a second 747. The jumbo cut the cost of a seat, and mass long-haul travel followed.

The Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 that the Constitution protected a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy, striking down most state bans. Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) kept the core of the ruling but let states regulate abortion before viability so long as they placed no “undue burden” on it.

Engineers asked, three times and through different channels, for Defense Department imaging of the wing in orbit. Mission managers cancelled the request, judging foam a maintenance issue rather than a safety one. The board later found that a rescue by Atlantis would have been “challenging, but…

With stock markets in Europe and Asia plunging on a US holiday, the Fed cut rates by three-quarters of a point before New York opened, its first cut between scheduled meetings since the weeks after 11 September 2001.