July 14

14 July to 12 September 1683, Rajab to Ramadan 1094 in the hijri calendar. Kara Mustafa Pasha’s mines had nearly breached the walls when a relief army under King Jan III Sobieski of Poland came down the Kahlenberg, its winged hussars in the lead, and routed the besiegers in an afternoon.

The crowd came for gunpowder. The fortress held just seven prisoners. About a hundred attackers died; the governor, the Marquis de Launay, was killed after he surrendered and his head carried on a pike. Louis XVI’s hunting diary for the day reads “Rien”, nothing: he had caught no game.

Hitler’s cabinet passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, in force from 1 January 1934. Hereditary health courts ordered the sterilisation of about 400,000 people. Its drafters had studied Laughlin’s model law.

The assembled bomb was winched to the top of a 100-foot steel tower over a pile of mattresses. Donald Hornig spent the next stormy night with it.

Honduras and El Salvador met three times in the 1970 qualifiers amid riots and a quarrel over Salvadoran settlers in Honduras. After El Salvador won the play-off in Mexico City, the two went to war: about 100 hours of fighting. Official counts put the dead at about two hundred; other estimates run…

When the West declined, China built and paid for 1,860 kilometres of line giving landlocked Zambia a route to the sea that avoided white-ruled Rhodesia and South Africa. At the peak about 13,500 Chinese and 38,000 African workers were on the line; more than 160 died, 64 of them Chinese.

Karlheinz Brandenburg’s team at the Fraunhofer Institute had shrunk CD audio to about a twelfth of its size by discarding what the ear cannot hear; an internal vote gave the files their name. Brandenburg tuned the codec by listening again and again to Suzanne Vega’s unaccompanied “Tom’s Diner”.

After nine and a half years it passed about 12,500 km from Pluto, showing a young world with nitrogen glaciers and a bright heart. Sending all the data home took more than a year.

A second try after Chandrayaan-2’s lander crashed in 2019. The lander Vikram and rover Pragyan were built to work for one lunar day, about fourteen Earth days, and did not wake after the night.