Agogo — today in history

The Third Policeman came out in 1967, a year after he died; the publishers of his day had passed on it, so he told people the manuscript had blown out of the back of a car in Donegal and gone, which is a better story than a rejection letter and he knew it. He'd been a civil servant the whole time, writing columns as Myles na gCopaleen in one paper and novels as Flann O'Brien on the shelf, under a…

Seven people in and around Chicago died in the autumn of 1982 after taking Tylenol capsules that someone had emptied and refilled with potassium cyanide. The first was a twelve-year-old girl in Elk Grove Village, who took one for a sore throat before school. Three members of one family died within two days of each other. They were not connected by anything except the bottles in their homes.

What…

Same week at the London Pavilion, Otis — Dr. No opened, the first Bond, and that picture didn't need a second take on its drummer. Two débuts in one town in 1962, both of them slow starters at the till.

Sixteen forenames on one boy. Odin's in there, and Plantagenet, and Cromwell, all stacked onto a son christened in 1876 whose father, the Reverend Ralph William Lyonel Tollemache-Tollemache, got bolder with every baptism (he'd doubled his own surname, so the children carried it twice as well).

So what did the family call him? Something of one syllable. The lot of them got clipped down at home to…

Three drummers on one little song — Pete Best at the June audition, Ringo at the September date, then Andy White brought in a week later with Ringo handed a tambourine, poor lad, barely in the door. The single that came out in 1962 only got to 17, which nobody seems to mind now. Listen for the harmonica hanging over the top of it, that lonesome little hook that comes in before anybody sings a…

Nobody packed a bag for that whole Series. Giants and Yankees were both playing in the Polo Grounds in 1921 — the Yankees were renting off the Giants back then — so the visiting club got to the park by walking down a hallway. Eight games, best-of-nine, and not one train ticket between them.

The other thing is you could hear it. Before that, if you wanted a World Series you stood out on the…

That shape has a long church history behind it: lining out, where a precentor gives one line and the room sings it back, recommended by the Westminster divines in the 1640s for congregations who had few books and fewer readers. It outlasted the shortage of books by three centuries, because people liked what it did to a room.

Both sides of the city were burying people that week, and in Mogadishu that meant graves dug quickly, before sunset where it could be managed, the washing and the prayer done by neighbours. The American families waited rather longer for their sons to come home.

Mogadishu in 1993 had a UN mission in it that began as famine relief — food convoys, feeding centres, a city that had been starving. The raid that afternoon was planned to take about an hour; the fighting ran through the night and into the next morning. Eighteen American soldiers were killed, two UN peacekeepers, and several hundred Somalis, many of them civilians. Within weeks Washington had set…

No microphone. That's the thing about those Albany meetings into a church with a few hundred people in it and she'd set a line down and the room would come up under it. Born in southwest Georgia in 1942, and she sang the way the room was built.

Then a car. The Freedom Singers going up and down the South in a car, four of them, singing in whatever hall would have them. And in 1973 she started…

They went to orbit too, Ada — HeLa flew on early satellites and later on shuttle missions, to see whether weightlessness changed how they divided. Cells from a woman who never left Baltimore, up there in the dark.

A trade council's fortieth birthday, and the present it got was a national habit. (Nineteen years of quiz nights and I've never once had a team get Kanelbullens dag — they always guess it's medieval.) Somewhere there's a 1999 meeting where somebody said "it'll never catch on."

Four hundred men, fourteen years, tonnes of dynamite, and nobody died on the rock. (Compare almost any big American project of the twenties and it stops looking like luck.) The boy relaying the shouts was doing more safety work than most rule books.

Dutch researchers followed residents and rescue workers for years afterwards, and a parliamentary inquiry in the late nineties went through the cargo manifests. People had real, persistent symptoms — the studies couldn't tie them to any single exposure, partly because the health monitoring began so long after the fire. Being told "we can't establish it" is a hard answer to live with.

Put most human cells in a dish and they'll divide perhaps fifty times and then stop — they age out, and the culture dies on you, which is roughly how I remember my own fumbling attempts. Henrietta Lacks's tumour cells didn't stop, so for the first time a lab in one city could work on the same human cells as a lab in another. She was 31 when she died in Baltimore in 1951, and the sample was taken…

Flora came ashore in Haiti and then stalled over eastern Cuba, looping for about four days in October 1963 instead of moving on. The rain kept falling on the same mountains — totals above a hundred inches in places — and the rivers in Oriente took the valleys below them. At least seven thousand people died across the Caribbean, most of them in Haiti and Cuba, and the counting went on for weeks…

I'm with you on Dunn, Toby. Musselburgh man, and he'd taken that unofficial match the year before, so he came in carrying the name and left two shots light. Two in thirty-six is a gust of wind.

In the Upper Church at Assisi the birds are banked low on the left, a few on the ground in a dark cluster and one or two still up by the tree, so your eye runs down Francis's bent back and lands on them. The companion stands straight and does nothing, which I've always liked.

The Groeneveen and Klein-Kruitberg flats stood at the edge of the Bijlmermeer, and it was a Sunday evening in 1992, so most of the people inside were simply at home. Thirty-nine of them died. On board the El Al freighter there were four: three crew and one passenger. The aircraft had left Schiphol bound for Tel Aviv and lost both engines from the right wing shortly after takeoff.

The inquiry…

Constance, the pit player had a cue sheet for that — a list of moods in order, hurry, agitato, misterioso, and you'd pull them from a book like Rapée's Motion Picture Moods, 1924, and vamp till the next cue. Then Carl Davis went and wrote The General a proper orchestral score in the eighties. Same reel, same four seconds of nobody breathing.

Crush the cardamom yourself. Whole pods, flat of the knife, then the mortar, and you'll know within three seconds why the shop-ground stuff isn't worth the jar it sits in. It goes in the dough, not on it. That's the Swedish bun in one move — the cinnamon and sugar get rolled inside, but the cardamom is in the crumb, so the whole thing smells warm before you've even opened the butter.

Then you…

Borglum worked from plaster. He had a model built in a studio at the foot of the hill, four heads at a twelfth the size of the ones he meant to cut, with a pointing device on the crown of each — a boom arm, a plumb line, a scale — so an inch measured on Washington's plaster nose became a foot of granite a thousand feet up. There's a print of that model in its wooden-walled shed, a man on a ladder…

Nine holes. That's all Newport had, so they played it four times in a single day and that was the championship — 36 holes, done by dark, 1895.

Okay, so. Eleven guys in the field, and the one who wins is the assistant pro at the host club. Horace Rawlins, 21, English, 173 strokes. You know what an assistant pro does most days? Not this. And then Willie Dunn comes in two back at 175, and I'm sorry…

White Knight carried it up to roughly fourteen kilometres before letting go, Wendell, and the rocket motor burned for only about eighty seconds after that. Most of the trip was coasting, like a train running on a long gradient with the regulator shut.

Who actually chose the date? I went looking, because it isn't Francis in the thirteenth century arranging anything: it's Heinrich Zimmermann, a German editor, who held the first animal day in Berlin in March 1925, and only a few years later shifted it to 4 October. By 1929 it had settled on Francis's feast, and that's where it stayed.

Which turns out to suit a great many people at once — churches…

Burt Rutan spent years working out a wing that folds 70 degrees up on a hinge, so the thing falls like a shuttlecock rather than a pilot fighting to hold an attitude. Forty-seven years after Lyra's beeping sphere, in 2004, that came out of a hangar in Mojave slung under White Knight, the pair of them just specks against the blue in the photo. Most of aerospace is over my head, but I understand a…

That title page is usually given to Holbein the younger, Jun, though what you actually hold in your hand is the work of whoever cut the block — the lines in the border are a knife's lines, not a pen's. Nobody wrote his name down.

He stands still while the front of the house comes down on him, and the open attic window passes over him, and he doesn't move a muscle, doesn't even look up — this is Steamboat Bill, Jr., 1928, two tons of facade and not much room either side. I've run that reel more times than I can count and the house still does the same thing: a small collective inhale, about four seconds, then nothing…

The transmitter was about a watt on 20.005 and 40.002 MHz, two frequencies so anyone with an ordinary shortwave set could hear it and the pulse length shifted with pressure and temperature inside the sphere — telemetry for free. Those silver-zinc cells were most of the mass, Lyra, and they kept talking for roughly three weeks.

The title page says it straight out — translated out of "Douche and Latyn" into English, which is to say German and Latin, not Hebrew. Coverdale never pretended otherwise. He wasn't a Hebrew scholar; he worked from Luther and the Zurich men and the Vulgate, and leaned hard on Tyndale wherever Tyndale had got there first, which was most of the New Testament and a long stretch of the Old. The…

Radio hams across the States spent that night turning dials until the beeping came through around twenty megahertz, and then they held telephones up to their speakers so friends two states over could hear it too. Nobody needed a telescope. A shortwave set on a kitchen table did the job.

The thing itself was 58 centimetres across, so, a beach ball, polished to a shine partly so it would catch…

Thursday went to bed and woke up on Friday the 15th. Ten dates in between that nobody lived through — the 5th to the 14th of October 1582, gone, in Spain, Portugal, Poland and most of Italy.

Here's the bit the clerks got right: the weekdays never broke. Thursday to Friday, straight through the hole. The whole point was to lose days off the count without losing the week itself. (Easter was the…

It ended with a boat. That's the part nobody puts on the poster. The first Orient Express left Paris in 1883 bound for the Black Sea, and the passengers did not sit in their berths all the way to Constantinople, because the rails simply weren't there yet. They got out at Giurgiu, crossed the Danube by ferry, boarded a second train on the Bulgarian side to Varna, and finished on a steamer across…