November 28

Standing in the stadium at Isthmia, Nero declared the province of Achaea free and gave the judges Roman citizenship and a large sum of money. Vespasian took the freedom back a few years later.

Thirty-eight days threading the channels at the tip of South America. On the way, the San Antonio, carrying most of the food, slipped away and sailed home to Spain. Magellan named the calm new ocean the Pacific.

Two Stratford farmers bound themselves for £40 so that William, 18, could marry “Anne Hathwey of Stratford”, 26, after only one reading of the banns. Anne was three months pregnant: their daughter Susanna was baptised on 26 May 1583.

After a lecture by Christopher Wren, twelve men agreed to found “a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning”. Charles II chartered it as the Royal Society in 1662, and a second charter in 1663 added “for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge”. Its motto: Nullius in…

Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met together for the first time. They agreed on a landing in France in May 1944, and Stalin promised to join the war against Japan once Germany was beaten.

The first successful mission to Mars. It carried a single television camera and a tape recorder that took more than a week to play its pictures back to Earth.

The Cambridge student helped build a 4.5-acre array of 2,048 aerials on posts and wire, then read its miles of chart paper. A bit of “scruff”, recorded at high speed, became pulses 1.337 seconds apart, as regular as a clock: a spinning neutron star. Her supervisor Antony Hewish shared the 1974…

Europe’s laboratory for the cargo bay: a pressurised module, built for ESA in Bremen, in which scientists worked in shirtsleeves on flights of one to two weeks. It flew from STS-9 to the Neurolab mission of 1998.

Ulf Merbold, Spacelab’s first flightSpacelab

STS-9 flew six people, a record, among them the first two payload specialists: Byron Lichtenberg of MIT and Ulf Merbold of West Germany, the first ESA astronaut and the first person who was not an American to fly on the shuttle.

After five months of public review, IUPAC approved nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts) and oganesson (Og). Oganesson's “-on” ending marks it as a member of group 18, alongside argon and xenon.

Lava crossed the access road and cut the power line to the observatory. For the first time since 1958 the record came from somewhere else: measurements moved to the summit of Maunakea while the station was cut off.