June 23

The Privy Council closed the London playhouses on 23 June 1592 after a riot in Southwark, and plague kept them shut for most of two years, with short winter seasons in between. Companies broke up or toured the provinces. Shakespeare turned to narrative poems for a patron.

Robert Clive, with about 3,000 men, most of them Indian sepoys, faced a Bengal army of some 50,000. Rain soaked the nawab’s powder, and Mir Jafar, his commander, kept his troops out of the fight in return for the throne. Mir Jafar paid for it: Clive alone took about £234,000, one of the largest…

A trading company became a state. In 1765 the Mughal emperor made the East India Company collector of the revenues of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and it conquered the rest of the subcontinent with sepoy armies paid from Indian taxes.

From Plassey to the end of its trade the Company was both a business and a state: it taxed, judged and made war, while still paying dividends to shareholders in London. Parliament spent these decades deciding who should really be in charge.

Robert Clive, with about 3,000 men, faced the nawab of Bengal’s army of some 50,000. The nawab’s commander Mir Jafar kept his troops out of the fight in return for the throne.

For its first century and a half the Company was a shipping and warehouse business that rented space in other people’s empires. It held its factories by leave of Mughal emperors and local rulers, and it made its money on the London auctions of what the ships brought home.

The Cherokee brigadier general, who had fought since 1861, gave up his Indian cavalry at Doaksville in the Choctaw Nation: the last Confederate general to surrender in the field.

A chain of cables from Porthcurno in Cornwall by way of Lisbon, Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt and Aden joined Britain to India under British ownership alone. A letter by steamer had taken about a month; a telegram now took hours. Porthcurno became the largest cable station in the world.

Technical expert, third class, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, a job Grossmann’s father had helped him to. Eight hours a day, six days a week, he judged patents for electrical machines, and he later called the office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas”.…

The perceptron built as a machine: a camera of 400 photocells wired at random to its “association units”, with the weights held by motor-driven potentiometers. It learned to recognise letters. The machine survives at the Smithsonian; the cover of this timeline shows it at work.

At the national championships. The record then stood for eight years.

Singapore bet on containers before it had the trade to justify them. The bet paid off: the city-state became one of the two busiest container ports in the world.

It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here. — James Hansen On a scorching day in Washington, NASA’s James Hansen told the Senate Energy Committee he was 99 per cent sure the warming was real and not chance, and that the…

Wiles heard of Ribet’s result over iced tea at a friend’s house: “I was just electrified.” He dropped everything, worked in his attic study in Princeton and told almost no one, publishing earlier work in small pieces so colleagues would not suspect. For years only his wife, Nada, knew.

Over three lectures on 21, 22 and 23 June, with a title that gave nothing away, Wiles built up his proof for semistable curves. At the end of the third he wrote Fermat’s Last Theorem on the board as a corollary and said: “I think I’ll stop here.” The next day it was on the front page of The New…

An 8.4-metre telescope on Cerro Pachón with the largest digital camera ever built, 3,200 megapixels, set to photograph the whole southern sky every few nights for ten years. It is named for Vera Rubin, whose galaxy measurements made the case for dark matter.