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Printed in 1604, sold in 1605

During January 1605 the Madrid bookseller Francisco de Robles began selling the first edition of Miguel de Cervantes's El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, printed by Juan de la Cuesta with a 1605 imprint.

The physical printing had happened earlier — in Madrid between 26 September and 1 December 1604. A legally required price authorization, the tasa, was signed at Valladolid on 20 December, which is what allowed completed copies to be sold.

The 16 January problem

No authoritative source consulted establishes 16 January as the publication day; the Biblioteca Nacional de España supports only January 1605.

The dated evidence points earlier. Some provisional copies were likely circulating in Valladolid by Christmas 1604, and the scholar Francisco Rico estimates Madrid readers may have obtained copies by Epiphany, 6 January 1605.

Eighty sheets in two months

The volume ran to 664 pages in 83 quarto sheets, with a probable first run of about 1,500 or 1,750 copies. Eighty sheets of main text and index were composed and printed in roughly two months — a pace that helps explain the first edition's abundant errors.

Demand followed quickly: two Lisbon editions received licenses in February and March 1605, a corrected second Madrid edition came in the spring, and nine editions appeared within the first ten years. This was the editio princeps of what is now called Part One; Cervantes's separately titled second part did not appear until 1615.

Heidelberg, 1609

A first edition of Johannes Kepler's Astronomia nova was published at Heidelberg in 1609, printed by Gotthard Vögelin after printing began in 1608. The best biographical evidence places its appearance in summer 1609 but does not establish an exact day.

The book presented Kepler's new theory of Mars, derived from Tycho Brahe's observations, and put into print the ellipse and area principles later numbered as his first and second laws.

Eight arcminutes

Kepler's circular and equant-based models could not satisfy Tycho's Mars observations within their known precision: the maximum mismatch was 8 arcminutes, against typical observational errors of 2 arcminutes or less.

In chapter 58 he concluded that the planet's path could be no figure other than a perfect ellipse; in chapter 60 he treated swept area as the measure of elapsed time.

Not a list of laws

Kepler did not present a numbered list called "Kepler's laws." That terminology and the familiar ordering are later conventions — in his investigation the area principle preceded the ellipse result.

The volume was expressly a physical or causal astronomy as well as a mathematical account, with the Sun assigned a causal role in planetary motion.

No well-supported single-day public reaction is known; the two principles were adopted gradually rather than replacing established astronomy at once.

The first hour of night, 7 January 1610

During the first hour of night at Padua on 7 January 1610, Galileo examined Jupiter through an improved telescope of approximately twenty power and recorded three small but bright points close to the planet.

The three visible points lay almost exactly on a line parallel to the ecliptic: two east of Jupiter and one west.

Three points, four moons

Galileo initially classified the points as fixed stars, although their straight alignment and brightness surprised him. He did not recognise satellites on 7 January.

Modern reconstruction identifies all four large moons as present in his view: Io and Europa were too close together to be resolved separately, so he recorded them as one point.

Six more days to the discovery

When he observed again on 8 January, the changed arrangement made him suspicious. By 11 January he concluded that three bodies moved around Jupiter, and on 13 January he first recorded four distinct bodies at once.

Simon Marius later asserted an independent observation dated 29 December 1609 in the Julian calendar, equivalent to 8 January 1610 Gregorian; the scope and reliability of that priority claim remain debated.

Galileo named the four bodies the Medicean Stars for Cosimo II de' Medici and his family. Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are names associated with Marius's later publication.

13 March 1610: a booklet appears in Venice

Sidereus Nuncius appeared in Venice on 13 March 1610, issued by Tommaso Baglioni. It was the first printed scientific work founded on observations made with a telescope.

Galileo dedicated it to Cosimo II de' Medici and named Jupiter's four attendants the Medicean Stars. The printed dedication is dated at Padua on 12 March, the day before the book appeared.

What the pages showed

The booklet reported observations of the Moon's uneven surface, stars previously invisible to the naked eye, the Milky Way and nebulous objects, and four bodies revolving around Jupiter.

Its charts were crowded with new objects: 36 telescopic stars drawn around the six familiar naked-eye stars of the Pleiades, and 80 more near Orion's Belt and Sword alongside 9 already known. Galileo put the height of one lunar prominence at more than four Italian miles.

Copies on the road the same day

On 13 March Galileo sent a freshly printed copy to Cosimo. The same day Sir Henry Wotton, England's ambassador in Venice, dispatched another to King James I.

The whole first edition came to 550 copies. Eleven days separated the end of the reported observing series from publication — printing had begun while Galileo's observations of Jupiter were still going on.

An entry in Liber D

On 8 November 1623 Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard entered Mr. William Shakespeers Comedyes Histories, and Tragedyes in the Stationers' Company's Liber D, securing the company's record of their right to the plays not already entered to other stationers.

The entry registered only those sixteen. It did not say the volume contained sixteen plays — the completed book held thirty-six, of which eighteen appeared in print for the first time.

Registration is not publication

The exact day copies first went on sale is unknown. The earliest attested retail transaction is Edward Dering's purchase on 5 December 1623 — and he did not buy one copy, he bought two.

So 8 November is demonstrably the registration date, but it is not a proven publication or first-sale date. The register entry itself is securely dated; whether copies were published or sold that day is not established.

Old Style, and a printer who did not live to finish

Both dates are English Old Style. England still used the Julian calendar in 1623, ten days behind the Gregorian calendar then used across much of continental Europe, so 8 November corresponds to 18 November Gregorian.

William Jaggard printed the volume in his London shop but died before the project was completed; Isaac Jaggard then took over the family shop. John Heminge and Henry Condell of the King's Men gathered the plays and signed the prefatory material. An estimated 750 copies were printed and 235 are known to survive, 82 of them at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

1628: a thin quarto out of Frankfurt

A Latin first edition of William Harvey's Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus appeared at Frankfurt am Main in 1628, issued by William Fitzer.

It ran to 72 numbered pages, four unnumbered pages and two leaves of plates. The first-edition catalogues consulted establish the year but no particular day or month.

The argument by arithmetic

The book put an experimentally argued model into print: the heart propels blood into the arteries, and the veins return it from the body to the heart. Dissections, ligatures and the one-way action of the cardiac and venous valves established the direction of flow.

Harvey's other lever was quantitative. Reckoning on more than a thousand heartbeats in half an hour — some people, he noted, reaching two to four thousand — he calculated a half-hour output ranging from 10 pounds 5 ounces to 83 pounds 4 ounces, depending on how much was assumed expelled per beat.

That was far more than food could continually replace, so the blood had to be returning in a circuit.

What he could not see, and what he did not win

Harvey did not discover the venous valves; earlier anatomists had described them. His contribution was explaining their role in one-way circulation.

He never saw capillaries, and considered instead direct anastomoses and passage through porous tissue. Microscopic evidence of the capillary connection came from Marcello Malpighi, after Harvey's death.

Nor did publication settle the question: prominent physicians initially rejected or attacked the argument.

27 May 1644: three armies where the Wall meets the sea

At Shanhai Pass, where the Great Wall reaches the sea about 150 miles east of Beijing, Wu Sangui's former Ming troops attacked Li Zicheng's Shun army on 27 May 1644 while Dorgon initially held the Qing force back.

Wu's soldiers wore white cloth patches on their backs so that Qing troops could distinguish them from Li's other Chinese troops.

Sand, then cavalry

The fighting ran for hours and weakened both Chinese armies. A fierce wind then filled the battlefield with sand, and Dorgon committed his cavalry against Li's flank.

The unexpected attack broke the Shun formation. Li's troops fled, leaving the battlefield and the strategic pass in Qing hands.

Whose victory this was

Wu had come to the pass unable to defeat Li on his own; he requested Qing aid and accepted Dorgon's demand for submission. This was no Ming restoration — the strategic beneficiary was Dorgon's Qing regime, which now controlled the passage into the North China Plain.

Li withdrew toward Beijing. Mark Elliott's account puts his army at about 60,000 against Wu's roughly 100,000; reported strengths vary substantially among historians, and no dependable casualty total survives.

Through the Chaoyang Gate

On 6 June 1644 — or 5 June in other respected modern accounts — Dorgon led Qing troops into Beijing through the Chaoyang Gate. The entry was unopposed: Li Zicheng's Shun army had already evacuated the capital after its defeat at Shanhai Pass.

Residents approached with incense and prostrated themselves as Dorgon entered. The word captured is misleading — there was no battle in the city.

The palanquin

Palace eunuchs surrendered the dead Chongzhen Emperor's insignia and offered Dorgon the imperial palanquin. He invoked the ancient Duke of Zhou and refused it, then accepted after ceremonial urging, and rode to the Wuying Palace.

The Qing claimed the throne in Beijing for the six-year-old Shunzhi Emperor, who had not yet arrived from Mukden. He reached the city in October and underwent the formal ceremony in November.

Which day, exactly

The Qing court date was the second day of the fifth lunar month. The Palace Museum, the Cambridge History of China and several modern studies convert it to 6 June; respected historians including Mark Elliott and Kenneth Swope give 5 June.

That one-day discrepancy remains unresolved in the modern literature. Occupying Beijing began Qing government in China proper; it did not deliver uncontested control of former Ming territory.

8 March 1655: a complaint in Northampton County

On 8 March 1655, Anthony Johnson — a free Black landholder — complained to the Northampton County Court in Virginia that Robert Parker was detaining his servant John Casor under the pretense that Casor was free.

The date is conventionally modernized. Surviving records may express it as March 1654/55, because the English legal year began on 25 March.

Two accounts of one indenture

The court weighed a deposition by Samuel Goldsmith, which set out Casor's claim to a seven- or eight-year indenture — plus a further seven years he said Johnson had extracted from him — against Johnson's claim that he held Casor for life.

The judges found that Parker had unjustly kept Casor from Johnson, ordered Casor to return immediately to Johnson's service, and ordered Parker to pay the costs of the suit.

What the order did and did not do

This was not a freedom suit brought by Casor. Johnson sued Parker, and the order settled that one dispute; it enacted no colony-wide slave code and created no statute.

The judgment calls Casor a servant and orders his return, but does not itself say slave, property, or explicitly for life — the lifetime character is inferred from Johnson's claim and the outcome. Calling Casor the first legally recognized slave in the future United States is a retrospective and disputed characterization; earlier records document lifetime enslavement, including John Punch's 1640 sentence.

A hole in the shutter

In his 1672 account Newton said that at the beginning of 1666 he obtained a triangular glass prism to investigate the familiar phenomenon of prismatic colours. He darkened a room, admitted sunlight through a small hole in the window shutter, and placed the prism at the opening so the refracted light struck the opposite wall.

Under the accepted laws of refraction he expected a roughly circular image. What appeared was a vividly coloured, elongated one.

Not the discovery of colours

Prisms making colours was already well known; Descartes had described prismatic rainbow colours. Newton's contribution was a different argument, worked out through subsequent tests: that white light is heterogeneous, made of differently refrangible rays that carry their own colours rather than acquiring them from the glass.

On that account a prism does not create the colours. It separates rays that already differ.

An approximate year

The exact day is unknown, and the year itself is soft. Newton's beginning of 1666 comes from his retrospective 1672 narrative, and Cambridge University Library scholarship notes that surviving evidence may place his initial optical discoveries in autumn 1665.

Nothing changed publicly. During the period later called his annus mirabilis Newton entered an essay on refraction in his mathematical notebook, but he did not publish the new theory of light until his 1672 letter to the Royal Society.

7 December 1676: four pages in the Journal des sçavans

On 7 December 1676 the Paris Journal des sçavans published "Démonstration touchant le mouvement de la lumière trouvé par M. Roemer de l'Académie Royale des Sciences" across four pages, at pp. 233–236.

Rømer did not write it. The report was in the third person, assembled by an anonymous reporter from his oral presentation to the Academy.

The argument from a moon's timetable

The report set out why Io's apparent orbital intervals — the moon's period runs about 42.5 hours — should lengthen as Earth moved away from Jupiter and shorten as Earth moved toward it, if light needed time to cross the changing distance.

It cited the decisive test directly: Io's emergence observed in Paris on 9 November came at 5:35:45, ten minutes later than a prediction based on August observations, as Rømer had forecast to the Academy.

What the number actually was

The published result was a travel time, not a speed: about 22 minutes for light to cross the diameter of Earth's orbit. The modern figure for that same crossing is 16 minutes 40 seconds.

Nothing in the report gave a value in distance per second, though it did bound light at about 3,000 Paris leagues in under a second. Publication produced no consensus — Cassini and others remained skeptical — but it handed other astronomers a testable correction for their Io eclipse tables.

Six months of pepper water

From April through September 1676, in Delft, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek repeatedly examined rain, well, sea and river water and infusions of pepper and other spices. He observed several kinds of moving microorganisms, including forms now identifiable as bacteria.

There was no single discovery day. The observations accumulated across those months and were then reported in one letter.

Letter L-040

On 9 October 1676 he sent Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society an eighteen-folio Dutch letter containing 145 observations from 19 series of liquids, describing the organisms' abundance, dimensions, shapes and motion.

It describes bacteria-sized organisms, some around one micrometre long, though neither the biological category nor the word bacteria yet existed. For one drop of pepper-water he offered a conservative estimate of more than a million living creatures, and later said the true figure might be eight times greater.

What 1676 is and is not the year of

The year is defensible for his first documented observations of bacteria, but not for microorganisms in general: he had already reported protozoa-like animalcules in water in 1674, and Hooke had published microscopic observations of mould in Micrographia in 1665.

The Royal Society sent no delegation to Delft. Leeuwenhoek gathered the eight local witnesses himself, and Hooke later reproduced the pepper-water observations in London. Translation and scrutiny took months: an excerpt appeared in Philosophical Transactions on 25 March 1677.