July 29

With Heraclius away in the Caucasus, Avars and Slavs attacked the land walls while a Persian army watched from across the Bosporus. The Slav canoes were sunk in the Golden Horn, and the city credited the Virgin with the victory.

Skylitzes says Basil blinded 15,000 Bulgarian prisoners, leaving one eye to every hundredth man to lead the rest home, and that Tsar Samuel died of shock at the sight. Historians think the number is exaggerated, and the name “Bulgar-slayer” was first used long after.

Olaf Haraldsson came back from exile among the Rus’ to win Norway and was killed by his own farmers and chieftains. Within a year his body was enshrined at Nidaros and he was Saint Olaf. Snorri says the sun went dark during the battle; the eclipse came a month later, on 31 August.

English fireships broke the Armada’s crescent at night off Calais, and the next day’s battle drove it into the North Sea and around Scotland and Ireland, where storms wrecked much of what was left. England dated the battle 29 July; the Spaniards wrote 8 August.

Townsend Harris’s Treaty of Amity and Commerce opened ports to trade, fixed low tariffs and put Americans under their own consuls’ courts. The great councillor Ii Naosuke signed it without the emperor’s consent, and Britain, France, Russia and the Netherlands had treaties like it within months.…

“Another tragedy.” With a single watch that night, the morning watch finds only the steersman: the second mate is gone. Captain and mate agree to go armed.

That July he gave her written conditions for staying: she would keep his clothes in order, bring three meals a day to his room, expect no intimacy, and leave his bedroom or study “without protest” when he asked. She left with Hans Albert and Eduard; Einstein wept at the station.

Serbia threw back three Austro-Hungarian invasions in 1914, then fell in the autumn of 1915 to a German, Austrian and Bulgarian attack. An Allied army of French, British, Serbian, Italian, Russian and Greek troops held a line north of Salonika for three years that Germans mocked as their largest…

The “Austerity Games”: no new venues, athletes in RAF camps and colleges, food still rationed. Germany and Japan were not invited. Fanny Blankers-Koen, a 30-year-old Dutch mother of two, won four gold medals.

On the day London’s Games opened, Ludwig Guttmann held an archery contest for sixteen paralysed ex-servicemen and women at his spinal unit. It grew into the Paralympic Games, first held alongside the Olympics in Rome in 1960.

The White House announced that the United States would launch small satellites during the International Geophysical Year of 1957–58. Four days later, at a congress in Copenhagen, the Soviet academician Leonid Sedov said the USSR would launch one too.

Ten months in which a beeping ball persuaded Americans they were losing the Cold War. Washington answered with ARPA, with money for science education and, when Eisenhower signed the Space Act, with NASA.

Six men were tried in the town's House of Culture. The director Viktor Bryukhanov, the chief engineer Nikolai Fomin and Dyatlov each got ten years; the others two to five. The reactor's design was not on trial.