November 19

Kublai’s letters to Japan had gone unanswered. A fleet from Korea took Tsushima and Iki and landed at Hakata Bay, where the invaders’ exploding bombs appear in Takezaki Suenaga’s scrolls. After a day ashore they sailed away. Whether a storm struck them is argued.

Cuba’s sugar planters wanted a faster way to the port, and the colony got its railway eleven years before Spain itself had one. Much of the work was done by enslaved people and by indentured labourers.

At the dedication of the soldiers’ cemetery, after Edward Everett’s two-hour oration, Lincoln spoke for about two minutes. The Bliss copy, his last, ends: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not…

German and Austro-Hungarian troops, using gas and infiltration tactics, broke through on the upper Isonzo. A young Erwin Rommel took Monte Matajur. Italy lost more than a quarter of a million prisoners and fell back more than 100 kilometres to the Piave, where the line held.

At Keio University, with the physicist Jun Ishiwara translating sentence by sentence, the lecture on relativity ran to about four hours.

On tour in Germany, Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic played in BASF’s concert hall for its workers, and BASF recorded them on a Magnetophon: the first concert ever recorded on magnetic tape. Part of the recording, from Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, survives.

Two gliders carrying 34 men, most of them Royal Engineers, were towed toward Vemork in bad weather. Both crashed, one tug with them; survivors were shot under Hitler’s Commando Order. Forty-one men died on the night of 19–20 November.

Satoru Iwata’s Nintendo bet on a remote you swing like a racket or a bowling ball; Japan got it on 2 December. Wii Sports, packed in everywhere but Japan and South Korea, taught grandparents to play, and retirement homes ran bowling leagues. It sold over 100 million.