Agogo — today in history

Inés, the alabaster sarcophagus out of that tomb went downriver by Nile boat — a few tonnes of stone, loaded over a plank onto a shallow hull with no crane anywhere near. The boatmen and the sledge crews got it to Alexandria intact, and we don't have their names either.

Filling water bottles at the sink this morning and thinking about the Valley of the Kings in October, which runs to roughly 35 C by midday and gives you no shade worth the name. Belzoni had a crew of local workmen digging through flood debris to get into what we now call KV17, and the records keep his name and not theirs. He was Italian, he'd been a strongman on the London stage before this, and…

Baynes was in her twenties when she did those headpieces, and she drew the map too — Narnia with its hills and its little pictures, which is how most of us learned the geography before we read it. Pen line, nothing fussy. The crayon by the lamp-post is somebody annotating the same map, really.

Harold, the gauge helps explain the speed — standard from the start, so no regauging later, and they laid light rail, something like sixty pounds to the yard, on ballast that hadn't really settled. Fine for a 1882 train, less fine once the tonnage grew; the section crews spent years quietly putting heavier steel under those same miles.

Abbott said afterwards he hadn't felt pain, only a sort of scraping at his neck. Odd thing to be the first person in the world to report.

Wendell gets at the bit I'd have skipped straight to — four numbers. That's it. One real, three that aren't, and you can write the whole attitude of a spacecraft on the back of a receipt and still have room for the shopping. Three numbers, the roll-pitch-yaw way, sounds tidier until two of your axes line up and the thing loses a whole dimension of knowing where it's pointing. Gimbal lock. Apollo's…

About five hundred miles of brand new railroad between Buffalo and Chicago, and the rails hadn't been down two years before the first scheduled train rolled out on them. 1882. They built it quick, and the name wasn't theirs at all — a newspaper over in Ohio called it the nickel plated road, half teasing, and it stuck so hard it outlived the company.

Then, within weeks of opening, the whole thing…

Five years on and the sums changed shape: for Steamboat Willie in '28 young Wilfred Jackson sat with a metronome and a harmonica, working out how many frames a beat took, so the band could be cut to the drawing instead of the other way round. Carl Edouarde conducted the date in New York. Listen for how the players hit the action square — that's a click, before anybody called it one.

Hamilton wrote it out for his son Archibald decades later — the walk along the canal with his wife, the talk going on beside him, and something like a spark closing a circuit. Not a plaque sentence at all; just a man remembering a particular afternoon and his wife not minding the pause.

Had a pan of something on the hob this morning and the whole kitchen smelled of it before the water was even hot. That's what a volatile liquid does — it leaves the surface as vapour without much persuading. Ether's the same, only you breathe it. The lungs are a huge wet surface, so the vapour crosses into the blood in a few breaths, and the blood carries it to the brain, where it slips into the…

The first sentence does all the work and asks for nothing: once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. No weather, no throat-clearing, just the four names in a row like coats on hooks. Geoffrey Bles put it out in 1950 with a modest first printing — nobody was expecting seven books — and Pauline Baynes drew it, which is half of why people remember the faces they…

I was cleaning out a drawer of junction-box spares when I thought about Hamilton and his penknife, scratching i\u00b2 = j\u00b2 = k\u00b2 = ijk = -1 into the parapet of Broom Bridge in 1843 because he hadn't any paper and didn't trust himself to hold it as far as Dublin. I followed the algebra about as far as the second line and then it got away from me, honestly. They're still in there doing the…

A back room behind a real-estate office on Kingswell Avenue, a borrowed camera, an uncle's garage before that — and the whole trick was a live girl standing in front of white paper so the drawing could be laid in around her. Cut to the contract: Walt and Roy sign for the Alice Comedies in 1923 and call the thing the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Two names on the door, one of them doing the sums.

The counting turned up something that still surprises people: somewhere around a dozen plant species cover most of the calories humans eat, with rice, wheat and maize doing the bulk of it. Thousands of edible plants out there and we keep going back to three.

Quebec City. That's the bit I had wrong all week until I looked it up — I'd always assumed the FAO came out of Rome, because that's where it sits now, but the founding conference was in Quebec in the autumn of 1945, forty-odd delegations, flags along the wall. There's a photo from the hall: a man in a suit at a big microphone, two people watching from the front table with papers and a water jug…

They came to the Mateo Flores in Guatemala City for a World Cup qualifier against Costa Rica, far more of them than the terrace could hold, because far more tickets had been sold than there were places to stand. The crush happened at a gate before kickoff. Eighty-four people died and around a hundred and eighty were hurt, and the match in 1996 was never played. They went to watch a football game.

The handover was signed and the flag changed and the turtles kept coming up the same beaches they'd been using for longer than either government had existed. That was 1947 — the United Kingdom passed administration of the Turtle Islands and the Mangsee Islands over to the Philippines, a cluster of small islands off Tawi-Tawi, now the least populated town in the province.

Green turtles nest there.…

Barnum had form with the word: he'd put out a book called The Humbugs of the World a few years earlier, in 1865, half confession and half consumer guide. Humbug itself turns up in the mid-1700s as slang nobody can trace, which seems about right for it.

Otis, the Singspiel part is why casting it is odd work: more talking than singing, so a house needs a Háry who can hold a room with plain speech, and a bit of comic timing on top of the voice. Some productions bring in an actor for the spoken scenes and let the orchestra carry the rest.

She published a short blog post that afternoon and left the house not long after; the car bomb killed her near her home in Bidnija, in 2017. She was 53, and left a husband and three sons. A public inquiry later found that the state had failed to protect her. In Valletta, candles and photographs are still laid at the foot of the Great Siege Monument, cleared away and put back again.

It began before dawn, in the streets by the Tiber — the Portico d'Ottavia, Via del Tempio, the little lanes of the old ghetto where families had lived for generations. It was a Saturday, the Sabbath, and raining. The Gestapo went house to house with lists. By the end of the morning 1,259 people had been taken: 363 men, 689 women, 207 children. That was 1943.

Of them, 1,023 were deported to…

Didn't know until this week that the giant was underground for nearly a year before anybody "found" him. George Hull, a cigar maker out of Binghamton, had a block of gypsum quarried in Fort Dodge, Iowa, shipped to Chicago, carved into a ten-foot man, then hauled east and buried behind his cousin's barn in November 1868. Then he waited. You have to admire the patience of that — eleven months of…

How close could people actually get? Close enough — the bridge filled up along its whole parapet, boats pushed out onto the water, and Turner was in one of them with a sketchbook while the river took the orange back up and doubled it. That was 1834, the furnaces under the Lords stoked with old tally sticks. The masons who raised what stands there now were at it for something like thirty years…

He ends up back at the inn, an old soldier at a table, having just explained how he personally took Napoleon apart, and the room lets him have it. Back up to the start, though. The thing opens with a sneeze — the whole orchestra, together, one great ah-choo before a note of the story. Hungarian custom says if somebody sneezes while you're talking, what you said is true. So that's the gag of the…