January 26

Among the signs before the fall of Jerusalem, Josephus lists “a star resembling a sword, which stood over the city, and a comet, that continued a whole year”. Many identify it with Halley’s return of 66 CE, four years before the Romans burned the Temple. Others doubt that Josephus meant it.

He was proclaimed in the Friday Market at Ghent, so that the Flemish towns, sworn to obey the king of France, could fight for him with a clear conscience. He quartered the French lilies into his arms, and English kings kept the title until 1801.

The end of sixteen years of war with the Holy League. The Ottomans gave up Hungary and Transylvania to Austria, the Morea to Venice and Podolia to Poland: their first peace signed as the loser, with British and Dutch mediators.

The third Da Ponte opera, K. 588. Joseph II died on 20 February and the theatres closed for mourning after five performances.

It began with an Ottoman attempt on the Suez Canal and ended with British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian cavalry in Damascus and Aleppo. The water pipeline and railway the British laid across Sinai set the pace of the advance.

Mackintosh, Joyce and Richards roped up to find a way through the pressure at the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier, and came on two of Scott’s sledges standing upright, three-quarters buried. That evening Joyce, Ernest Wild and Hayward hauled a fortnight’s food up the glacier: the last depot.

In an attic room in Soho, John Logie Baird showed members of the Royal Institution moving faces on a screen, built from 30 lines by a spinning disc punched with holes. Mechanical television was a dead end, but it was the first to show a recognisable living face.

Bohr had carried the news across the Atlantic. At the Washington conference on theoretical physics he and Fermi made it public, and physicists left the room to repeat it; within days it had been confirmed at Columbia, the Carnegie Institution and Berkeley.

First light of the Hale telescopeHale Telescope

After Hale’s 1928 article in Harper’s, the Rockefeller Foundation gave $6 million for a 200-inch. Corning cast the Pyrex blank in 1934; grinding and polishing it took over a decade, with a war in between, and Hale died in 1938. Hubble took the first photograph. It was the world’s most powerful…

The constitution came into force with every adult of 21 on the roll, with no property or literacy stage in between. For the first election, in 1951–52, some 2.8 million women were struck off because they had registered as someone’s wife or mother rather than by their own names.

King moved his family into a slum flat in North Lawndale to take the movement north, against segregated housing. It ended with a Summit Agreement on open housing that the city did little to honour.