1977Voyager 1 sets off for the outer planets and beyond
In the late 1970s Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune lined up in a way that happens only once every 176 years, allowing a spacecraft to swing from one planet to the next using each one’s gravity. NASA built two identical probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, to make the most of it. Each carried cameras and instruments powered by a small nuclear generator, and a gold-plated record of sounds, music and greetings from Earth in case it were ever found.
Voyager 2 left first, on 20 August 1977. Voyager 1 followed on 5 September, lifting off from Cape Canaveral on a Titan-Centaur rocket at 8:56 in the morning, on a faster path that soon carried it ahead of its twin. It reached Jupiter in 1979 and Saturn in 1980, sending back the first detailed views of their moons, and then headed out of the plane of the planets. In 2012 it became the first human-made object to reach interstellar space, and it is still sending faint signals home from more distant than anything else people have built.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NASA: Voyager 1 launches aboard Titan III/Centaur ↗
1905The Treaty of Portsmouth ends the Russo-Japanese War
In February 1904 Japan attacked the Russian fleet at Port Arthur, opening a war over who would control Manchuria and Korea. To the world’s surprise Japan won almost every battle, taking Port Arthur and destroying Russia’s Baltic Fleet at Tsushima in May 1905. But both countries were exhausted, and the American president Theodore Roosevelt offered to bring them together. In August their envoys, led by Sergei Witte for Russia and Foreign Minister Komura Jutaro for Japan, met at the naval shipyard at Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
After weeks of hard bargaining over money and territory, the treaty was signed on 5 September 1905. Russia handed over its lease on Port Arthur and the Liaodong Peninsula, gave Japan the southern half of Sakhalin island and accepted Korea as a Japanese sphere of interest, but paid no war indemnity. In Japan, where many had expected more, the terms set off riots in Tokyo. It was the first time an Asian power had defeated a European great power in modern war, and Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for his part.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Office of the Historian: The Treaty of Portsmouth and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905 ↗
1774The First Continental Congress meets in Philadelphia
After the Boston Tea Party of December 1773, Parliament passed a series of laws to punish Massachusetts: the port of Boston was closed and the colony’s charter curtailed. Colonists called them the Intolerable Acts. Committees across the colonies agreed that a common answer was needed, and they chose delegates to meet in Philadelphia, the largest city in British North America.
On 5 September 1774, 56 delegates from twelve colonies, all but Georgia, gathered at Carpenters’ Hall and chose Peyton Randolph of Virginia as their president. Among them were George Washington, John and Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry. Over seven weeks they set out the colonists’ rights, agreed a boycott of British goods and resolved to meet again the following May if their grievances were not answered. They were not, and by the time the Second Continental Congress met, fighting had begun at Lexington and Concord.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Archives, Pieces of History: The First Continental Congress convenes ↗
1661Louis XIV has his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet arrested
Nicolas Fouquet had run France’s finances since 1653, raising money for the crown through a web of loans in which his own fortune and the state’s were hard to tell apart. He spent lavishly on art and building, and at Vaux-le-Vicomte, south-east of Paris, the architect Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the gardener André Le Nôtre created for him the most splendid house in France. When Cardinal Mazarin died in March 1661, Fouquet hoped to take his place as chief minister, but the young Louis XIV decided to rule by himself, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert was pressing charges of fraud against his rival.
On 17 August 1661 Fouquet gave a magnificent fête for the king at Vaux, with fireworks and a new comedy by Molière. Less than three weeks later, on 5 September 1661, he was arrested at Nantes by d’Artagnan, captain of the king’s musketeers. After a trial lasting three years he was sentenced to banishment, which the king changed to life imprisonment; he died in the fortress of Pignerol in the Alps in 1680. Louis took Fouquet’s team of artists to build something grander still: Versailles.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte: Nicolas Fouquet ↗
1978Egypt and Israel begin peace talks at Camp David
Egypt and Israel had fought four wars in 25 years, and Israel still held the Sinai Peninsula, taken in 1967. In November 1977 Egypt’s president Anwar Sadat stunned the world by flying to Jerusalem to address the Israeli parliament, but talks between the two governments soon stalled. The American president Jimmy Carter invited Sadat and the Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin to the presidential retreat at Camp David, in the hills of Maryland.
The three leaders and their teams arrived on 5 September 1978. For thirteen days they stayed in the woodland cabins, often too angry to meet face to face, while Carter carried drafts between them. On 17 September they signed two frameworks at the White House: one for peace between Egypt and Israel, the other for talks on the future of the West Bank and Gaza. Sadat and Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize, and in March 1979 Egypt became the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel, which returned the Sinai.
Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Office of the Historian: The Camp David Accords and the Arab-Israeli peace process ↗
