July 23

Sher Shah Suri drove Humayun into exile and in five years reorganised the north: a silver rupiya, a land survey and a road with rest houses from Bengal to the Indus that the Mughals kept. Humayun came back fifteen years later.

From the first London inoculations to the Vaccination Act of 1840, which made variolation a crime and vaccination free. Variolation gave a real, usually mild smallpox and killed far fewer than the natural disease, but the inoculated could infect others, which is why it was banned once cowpox…

Fourteen years from the Young Turk Revolution to the end of the sultanate: the loss of Libya and the Balkans, a one-party government, the First World War, the destruction of the Armenians, and a new state built in Ankara.

Abdülhamid II granted a constitution, suspended it within fourteen months and ruled alone for thirty years from Yıldız Palace: railways, telegraphs and schools, pan-Islamic politics, censorship and a network of informers.

Officers of the Committee of Union and Progress took to the Macedonian hills and threatened to march on Istanbul. Abdülhamid restored the constitution of 1876, and crowds of Muslims, Christians and Jews celebrated together in Salonica.

Delivered in Belgrade at six in the evening with 48 hours to answer. Serbia accepted nearly every demand but the one that would let Austro-Hungarian officials investigate on Serbian soil, and Vienna broke off relations.

A police raid on an after-hours bar at 12th Street and Clairmount set off the deadliest disorder of the “long, hot summer”. The Kerner Commission counted 43 dead, most of them Black, and more than 7,000 arrested; Johnson sent in Army paratroopers.

Twelve and a half minutes in which each of the three thanked the people on the ground who had made the flight possible.

Fischer, who almost always opened with 1.e4, played 1.c4 and won a flawless Queen’s Gambit. Spassky joined the audience’s applause.

The US licensed a hepatitis B vaccine made by yeast carrying the gene for the virus’s surface protein. The first hepatitis B vaccine, licensed in 1981, had been purified from the blood plasma of infected people.

The shortest Tour in over eighty years, at 3,285 kilometres. The holder, Pedro Delgado, turned up late for the prologue in Luxembourg and lost nearly three minutes before he had turned a pedal; he fought back to third.

A 24.5-kilometre time trial from Versailles to the Champs-Élysées. LeMond, on triathlon handlebars, was 58 seconds faster than Fignon and won the Tour by eight seconds, the closest finish in the men’s race.

Europe’s first deep-space mission, named after the painter who put a comet in his Nativity in 1305. After Halley it became the first craft to visit two comets, passing Grigg–Skjellerup in July 1992.

Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a shuttle, flew the heaviest payload one ever carried. X-rays pass through an ordinary mirror, so Chandra’s are nested barrels that they glance off, like stones skipping on water.

STS-93 was the first shuttle flight with a woman in command. Its payload, the Chandra X-ray Observatory on its booster stage, was the heaviest the shuttle ever launched.

Kosuke Morita's team at RIKEN fired zinc at bismuth for the best part of nine years and saw three atoms of element 113, the last in August 2012. Dubna had reported 113 as a decay product of element 115 in 2004, but the referees credited RIKEN: the first element discovered in Asia.

A high-speed train, stopped after lightning damaged the signals, was hit from behind by another. Forty people died and about 190 were injured. Officials had wreckage buried at the site before public anger forced them to dig it up; the official inquiry blamed design flaws in the signals and poor…

China’s first independent Mars mission carried an orbiter, a lander and a rover at once, and all three worked on the first attempt.

Held a year late under a state of emergency, with almost no spectators: athletes competed in empty venues, and the rebuilt National Stadium stood on the site of the 1964 one.

Musk announced that the bird would go; the next day an X replaced it on the website. Tweets became posts.