Explore 7 January

Galileo Galilei, in a portrait held by Royal Museums Greenwich.

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Justus Sustermans · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Galileo sees the moons of Jupiter

On the night of 7 January 1610, in Padua, Galileo Galilei turned his newly improved telescope on Jupiter and saw three small points of light beside it, lined up like tiny stars. Night after night they changed position; a few days later he found a fourth, and by mid-January he understood that they were moons circling Jupiter.

It was the first proof that not everything in the heavens went round the Earth. Galileo rushed his discoveries into print that March in The Starry Messenger, and named the moons the Medicean Stars after his hoped-for patrons in Florence.

A print of Blanchard and Jeffries’s balloon crossing the English Channel in 1785.

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Jmack361 · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

Two balloonists fly across the English Channel

On 7 January 1785 the French balloonist Jean-Pierre Blanchard and his American backer, the Boston doctor John Jeffries, rose from the cliffs of Dover in a hydrogen balloon and headed for France.

The balloon kept sinking, and to stay in the air they threw out their ballast, their equipment and even much of their clothing. They came down safely in a forest near Calais, the first people to fly across the Channel, carrying what is often called the first international airmail.

Masts of the Rugby Radio Station in England, which carried the radio link of the first transatlantic telephone service; photographed in 2005.

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David Reid · CC BY-SA 2.0Resized and cropped for display.

The first telephone call across the Atlantic

Until 1927 the only way to send words across the Atlantic at once was by telegraph. On 7 January that year the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and the British Post Office opened a public telephone service between New York and London, carried by long-wave radio between stations in the United States and Britain.

The first official call linked the head of AT&T in New York with the head of the Post Office in London. Calls were very expensive, and telephone cables under the ocean took over only in 1956.

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Lucas Horenbout · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Catherine of Aragon

Spanish princess and first wife of Henry VIII, whose annulment led to England’s break with Rome.

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Swiss Studios · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Edmund Barton

First prime minister of Australia, from 1901 to 1903.

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Napoleon Sarony · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Nikola Tesla

Serbian-American inventor of the alternating-current motor and pioneer of electric power.

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Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Hirohito

Emperor of Japan from 1926 through the war and the post-war recovery, the longest reign in its history.