History in numbers

Luther sent the 95 Theses enclosed with a letter to Albert of Brandenburg, Archbishop of Mainz, on 31 October 1517, a date now considered the start of the Reformation and commemorated annually as Reformation Day.

A small firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) announced a computer kit called the Altair, which met the social as well as technical requirements for a small personal computer.

Roberts developed the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800, which was featured on the January 1975 cover of Popular Electronics.

Jenner subsequently proved that having been inoculated with cowpox, Phipps was immune to smallpox.

DEC's pioneer C. Gordon Bell states that the LINC project began in 1961, with first delivery in March 1962

Copernicus did not only come up with a theory regarding the nature of the sun in relation to the earth, but thoroughly worked to debunk some of the minor details within the geocentric theory.

Copernicus' major work on his heliocentric theory was Dē revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published in the year of his death, 1543.

Copernicus gets credit for being the European originator of heliocentrism with the publication of On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543. The Catholic Church, however, remained ground in its anti-Copernican beliefs until the 19th century.

The Church eventually lifted the ban on Galileo's Dialogue in 1822, when it was common knowledge that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe.

“De revolutionibus” initially met no resistance from the Catholic Church.

While the Catholic Church initially accepted heliocentricity, Catholics eventually joined the wave of Protestant opposition and banned the book in 1616.

It marked a great triumph for Galileo: his arguments for Copernicus's system stood in print at last, and with the blessing of the Church.

And yet in 1632, he published his Dialogue, an imagined conversation between three men, one pro-Copernican, one pro-Ptolemaic, and one neutral, about astronomy and science.

Often heralded as one of the most important scientific advances in molecular biology, PCR revolutionised the study of DNA to such an extent that its creator Kary B. Mullis, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. in 1993.

In 1985, Kary Mullis invented the process known as polymerase chain reaction (PCR), in which a small amount of DNA can be copied in large quantities over a short period of time.

The conquest of Constantinople was a key event of the Late Middle Ages and is sometimes considered the end of the Medieval period.

The attacking Ottoman army was commanded by the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II (later called "the Conqueror")

Richard declared the lives of the Muslim defenders of Acre forfeit and set August 20 as the date for their execution.

King Richard arrived on the scene in June 1191 to find Acre under siege by a Christian army.

A second variation - pneumonic plague - attacked the respiratory system and was spread by merely breathing the exhaled air of a victim. It was much more virulent than its bubonic cousin.

The Black Death reached the shores of Italy in the spring of 1348 unleashing a rampage of death across Europe unprecedented in recorded history.

Since then, the discovery of penicillin changed the course of medicine and has enabled physicians to treat formerly severe and life-threatening illnesses such as bacterial endocarditis, meningitis, pneumococcal pneumonia, gonorrhoea and syphilis.

In 1928 Alexander Fleming first observed that colonies of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus failed to grow in those areas of a culture that had been accidentally contaminated by the green mold Penicillium notatum.

After hundreds of years of suffering, the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s meant that infections such as syphilis, gonorrhoea and chlamydia could finally be cured.

It is surmised that this chain of transmission began in Spain in 1493 with the return of members of Columbus’s first voyage to the Caribbean Islands.

Mast cells are very similar to basophil granulocytes in blood. Both are granulated cells that contain histamine and heparin, an anticoagulant.

Unlike other hematopoietic cells of the immune system, mast cells naturally occur in the human brain where they interact with the neuroimmune system.

As news on the etiology of tuberculosis spread worldwide, Koch became internationally famous.

On March 24, 1882, Koch presented his findings on tuberculosis at a meeting of the Berlin Physiological Society. That demonstration is now regarded as one of the most influential presentations in medical history.

The high quality and relatively low price of the Gutenberg Bible established the superiority of movable type, and printing presses rapidly spread across Europe, leading up to the Renaissance.

In March 1455, the future Pope Pius II wrote that he had seen pages from the Gutenberg Bible displayed in Frankfurt to promote the edition, and that either 158 or 180 copies had been printed,

Roger Bacon described spectacles; elucidated the principles of reflection, refraction, and spherical aberration. He used a camera obscura (which projects an image through a pinhole) to observe eclipses of the Sun.

Sometime between 1277 and 1279, Bacon was condemned to prison by his fellow Franciscans because of certain “suspected novelties” in his teaching.

On May 1, this coalition initiated a general strike throughout the United States. On May 3, fighting broke out at the McCormick Reaper Works in Chicago, and at least two workers were killed by the police.

In 1886, a broad coalition of labor organizations joined to campaign for an eight-hour workday.

Although monomorphic germ-theory and bacterial pleomorphic observation preceded him, Koch became the first to link a specific bacterium with a specific disease.

He presented his experiments to Ferdinand Cohn, Germany's most renowned botanist of the time. Deeply impressed, Cohn offered to publish Koch's paper in his own botanical journal. That paper was published in 1876, when Koch was thirty-two years old.

Shortly after taking office, he was wounded in an assassination attempt.

In addition to placing a roadblock in the path of U.S.-Iranian relations, it was also widely believed the Iranian hostage crises contributed to Carter’s defeat by Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.

Using slogans such as “It’s morning in America” and “America is back,” his reelection campaign emphasized the country’s economic prosperity and its renewed leadership role in world affairs.

In seeking to be reelected in 1984, Reagan had carried 49 of 50 states.

Despite his resounding victory, Nixon would soon be forced to resign in disgrace in the worst political scandal in United States history.

But Nixon’s resignation in 1974 put Vice President Gerald Ford in the Oval Office.

Had he taken this step earlier, Humphrey might have won the election, as polls showed him gaining rapidly on Nixon in the final days of the campaign.

Nixon won the Republican nomination for president in 1968 by putting together a coalition that included Southern conservatives.

Over 100,000 antiwar demonstrators gather at the Lincoln Memorial during President Richard Nixon’s second Inauguration, for a March Against Death protesting renewed U.S. bombing in Vietnam.

Renominated in 1972, Nixon defeated his Democratic challenger in one of the largest landslide victories in the history of American presidential elections: 46.7 million to 28.9 million in the popular vote and 520 to 17 in the electoral vote.

For the next few weeks, the Pilgrims explored Cape Cod and eventually settled on Plymouth for their plantation.

On September 16 of 1620, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England with 102 souls on board. These colonists- men, women, children, some seeking fortune, some seeking religious freedom – were later known as pilgrims.

In defiance of a ban on public gatherings in Berlin, the KPD had organized a rally to celebrate May Day.

In the lead-up to the 1929 celebration of International Workers' Day on the first of May, KPD-affiliated newspapers urged members and sympathizers to take to the streets.

Occurring near the end of the American Civil War, the assassination was part of a larger conspiracy intended by Booth to revive the Confederate cause by eliminating the three most important officials of the United States government.

The Lincoln catafalque is a catafalque hastily constructed in 1865 to support the casket of Abraham Lincoln while the president's body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.

Many of the Second Aliyah immigrants were idealists, inspired by the revolutionary ideals then sweeping the Russian Empire who sought to create a communal agricultural settlement system in Palestine.

Degania Alef was founded in 1909 by seven Second Aliyah Halutzim, who came from Romny, Russia, on land acquired by the Jewish National Fund.

The Kiev pogrom is considered the worst of the pogroms that swept through south-western Imperial Russia

The pogroms of the 1880s took place during the period of confusion which prevailed in The Kiev pogrom of 1881 lasted for three days. It began on 26 April (7 May), 1881 the city of Kiev itself and spread to villages in the surrounding region.

In the Late Middles Ages, Strasbourg was the most important city on the Upper Rhine. Since it had rid itself of rule by the bishop in 1262, the city was autonomous and effectively enjoyed Imperial immediacy.

The Strasbourg massacre occurred on February 14, 1349, when several hundred Jews were publicly burnt to death, and the rest of them expelled from the city as part of the Black Death persecutions.

He was crowned William I (although is more commonly referred to as William the Conqueror) in Westminster Abbey, the burial place of Edward the Confessor, the king from whom William derived his claim to the throne.

William I, usually known as William the Conqueror and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first Norman monarch of England, reigning from 1066 until his death in 1087.

Only a single badly wounded horse remained from Custer’s annihilated battalion. That horse, Comanche, managed to survive, and for many years it would appear in 7th Cavalry parades, saddled but riderless.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, fought on June 25, 1876, near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory, pitted federal troops led by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer against a band of Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors.

After navigating through the South American strait, three ships under the command of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan reach the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Europeans to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

At the news that the ocean had been sighted, the iron-willed admiral reportedly broke down and cried with joy.

Also known as the Seven Years’ War, this New World conflict marked another chapter in the long imperial struggle between Britain and France.

When France’s expansion into the Ohio River valley brought repeated conflict with the claims of the British colonies, a series of battles led to the official British declaration of war in 1756.

With a stroke of the pen, Treaty of Paris stripped France of its North American empire. Spain, which allied with France, was forced to cede Florida to the British,

Nine years of armed conflict between the two countries on the North American continent ended with the ratification of the Treaty of Paris by the British Parliament on February 10, 1763.

Belgium gained independence in 1830 when it broke away from the rest of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

To obtain a clearer majority in the Bundestag, after that vote, Helmut Kohl put up a motion of confidence in which the new CDU-FDP coalition intentionally voted against the Chancellor that it just put into power.

Helmut Kohl became chancellor through the constructive no-confidence vote in August 1982, his government purposely set out to lose a simple no-confidence provision in order to bring about new elections.

The Peace of Münster is sometimes considered the beginning of the Dutch Golden Age.

Peace of Münster was signed by the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of Spain on 30 January 1648, and was ratified in Münster on 15 May 1648.

It appears that three years after Niépce’s death, Daguerre had discovered that a latent image forms on a plate of iodized silver and that it can be “developed” and made visible by exposure to mercury vapour, which settles on the exposed parts of the image

In 1839 Niépce’s son and Daguerre sold full rights to the daguerreotype and the heliograph to the French government, in return for annuities for life.

The secret development of the reactor was the first major technical achievement for the Manhattan Project, the Allied effort to create atomic bombs during World War II.

Fermi led the team that designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Darwin formulated his bold theory in private, after returning from a voyage around the world aboard HMS Beagle, but it was not until two decades later, he finally gave it full public expression in his world-famous book.

Darwin would not sail as a lowly surgeon-naturalist but as a self-financed gentleman companion to the 26-year-old captain, Robert Fitzroy, an aristocrat who feared the loneliness of command.

The assassination sparked four days of riots that left more than 8,000 Indian Sikhs dead in revenge attacks.

On 31 October 1984, Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, was killed by her Sikh bodyguards.

Thatcher’s three consecutive terms in office marked the longest continuous tenure of a British prime minister since 1827.

A general election was called after the Callaghan ministry lost a motion of no confidence in early 1979. The Conservatives won a 44-seat majority in the House of Commons, and Thatcher became the first female British prime minister.

The scale of the defeat forced the Ottoman Empire into the Treaty of Karlowitz ceding Croatia, Hungary, Transylvania and Slavonia to Austria. It was one of the Ottoman Empire's greatest defeats and ultimately signalled the end of its European dominance.

The battle was the most decisive engagement of the war, and it saw the Ottomans suffer an overwhelming defeat by an Imperial force half as large sent by Emperor Leopold I.

It was only in 1624 that the Jews had been officially permitted to return to Vienna after the previous expulsion, in 1421. They found themselves confined to a newly established ghetto that grew steadily.

It was only a matter of time before the emperor, for what he called “the glory of God,” ordered the removal of the entire community – 3,000 to 4,000 people. That was on March 1, 1670.

The American Civil War resulted in the end of the institution of slavery, and in its aftermath many women abolitionists put on hold their desire for universal suffrage in favour of ensuring suffrage for newly freed male slaves.

The Nineteenth Amendment was adopted after a long campaign by its advocates, who had largely despaired of attaining their goal through modification of individual state laws.

U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton looking on as Yitzhak Rabin (left) shakes hands with Yasser Arafat after signing the Oslo Accords.

Shortly after Oslo II was passed in the Knesset, Rabin decided on a public campaign to rally his supporters, and it was following the first such rally in Tel Aviv in November 1995 that he was assassinated by a Jewish religious fanatic.

Blumberg and Millman discovered people suffering from hepatitis B had antigens too and realized that injecting them into a patient produces antibodies. Separating the antigens from the blood of chronic hepatitis B patients led to the coveted vaccine.

In 1976, Dr. Blumberg won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the hepatitis B virus. He and his colleagues discovered the virus in 1967, and invented the first hepatitis B vaccine in 1969.

Czar Alexander II, the leader of Russia, was assassinated in St. Petersburg when a bomb was thrown into his carriage.

Approximately 2.3 million Jews left Russia between 1881 and 1930 with the great majority coming to the United States, North and South American, South Africa and Australia.