Timeline

For sixteen hundred years the Pharos of Alexandria threw light over a sea. Three earthquakes finished what nothing else could.

He used balance points to discover the volumes of curved solids, then proved them with strict geometry. The Greeks called it forbidden. He called it the Method.

Around 240 BC the chief librarian at Alexandria measured the planet's circumference using two shadows and a piece of arithmetic. He was off by about two percent.

Sponge divers found a corroded lump of bronze in 1901. It took a hundred and twenty years to admit what it actually was.

Hypatia of Alexandria was the most famous philosopher in the eastern Mediterranean. In March 415 a crowd dragged her from her carriage and killed her with roof tiles.

In the summer of 1349 thousands of penitents marched through plague-stricken Europe flogging themselves twice a day. The Pope banned them within months.

Six weeks before the plague reached the city, the council of Strasbourg deposed its mayors, replaced them, and burned the city's Jewish community alive.

Five weeks before the Strasbourg massacre, Basel built a wooden house on an island in the Rhine, locked roughly six hundred of its Jews inside, and burned it.

Edward II of England was forced to abdicate, locked in a Gloucestershire castle, and died there in September 1327. Or did he escape and live another fourteen years?

In July 1518 a woman in Strasbourg began to dance in the street. By August several hundred people had joined her, and some of them had died of it.

In December 1566 the 20-year-old Tycho Brahe and his cousin fought in the dark with rapiers over a mathematical disagreement. Tycho lost the bridge of his nose.

In November 1577 a comet appeared over Europe so bright it cast shadows. A twenty-eight-year-old Dane measured its distance and demolished Aristotle's heavens.

Tycho Brahe died because nobody told him he could leave the dinner table. Four centuries later they dug him up to find out for sure.

In 1620 the seventy-four-year-old mother of Johannes Kepler was arrested for witchcraft. He spent six years getting her out.

On the morning of 25 October 1760 the King of Great Britain rang for his chocolate, walked to the privy, and was dead before his valet got back.

Hans Egede spent fifteen years on the Greenland coast looking for Norse Christians who had been dead for three centuries. He found ruins, ice, and Inuit.

Félix Faure had ambitions of being Caesar. On a February afternoon in 1899, he became something else.

London's sewer system was funded in eighteen days. It took a heatwave, a river of feces, and a Parliament that could not breathe.

On a Monday morning in August 1883, a volcano in the Sunda Strait made a noise that was registered, four thousand eight hundred kilometers away, as gunfire.

In June 1816 it rained for a month at Lake Geneva. Five English visitors were stuck indoors. One of them was eighteen years old, and she had a dream.

In September 1854, John Snow walked door to door through Soho with a map, a hypothesis, and a problem the city wouldn't believe.

Tambora killed more people than Krakatoa, cooled the planet for two years, and started the Year Without a Summer. The Western press barely noticed.

In the 1850s the central business district of Chicago was raised four to fourteen feet on jackscrews while continuing to operate. People kept eating at the hotels.

Eight years after Frankenstein, Mary Shelley published a novel about a global pandemic that kills everyone except one narrator. Critics hated it. They had reasons.

On 6 December 1917, Vince Coleman had ninety seconds to warn the incoming trains. He used them, and then he was gone.

On 8 May 1902 a volcano on Martinique destroyed a city of thirty thousand. Two men lived to tell about it. One was in a dungeon.

On 16 April 1947 a French freighter loaded with fertilizer caught fire at a Texas dock. Everyone but Captain de Guillebon ran. He fought the fire.

In January 1962 three students at a Tanganyikan girls' school began to laugh and could not stop. By the end of the year a thousand others had joined them.

Every November, Nova Scotia cuts down a 45-foot white spruce and ships it to Boston Common. The tradition is a thank-you for a relief train that arrived in 1917.

On 24 July 1915 a steamer chartered for a Western Electric company picnic capsized at its Chicago River mooring. 844 people died in twenty feet of water.

On 30 June 1908 something exploded above central Siberia with the force of a hydrogen bomb. It took the first scientists nineteen years to reach the site.

A decade after President Faure died in her arms, Marguerite Steinheil was charged with the murders of her mother and her husband. Paris had been waiting.

On 4 August 2020 the same chemical that destroyed Texas City in 1947 destroyed central Beirut. It had been quietly stored in a port warehouse for six years.

On 21 September 2001 a fertilizer plant in Toulouse exploded with the force of a small nuclear bomb. France first assumed it was terrorism. It wasn't.

In 1906 a Danish scholar in Istanbul opened a medieval Greek prayer book and noticed faint mathematics underneath the prayers. It was Archimedes.

Caesar's fire, the Christian mob, the Caliph's order — every famous ending of the Library of Alexandria is wrong, or only partly true. It died slowly.

From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.

Between 1608 and 1814 the river through London froze solid often enough to hold fairs on its surface. Then they tore down a bridge, and it never froze again.