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6 March 1857, in Washington

On 6 March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the Supreme Court's opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. It came two days after James Buchanan's inauguration, in which the new president had urged acceptance of the still-forthcoming decision.

The Court rejected Scott's federal suit on the ground that a person descended from Africans imported and sold as slaves — enslaved or free — could not be a United States citizen for purposes of federal diversity jurisdiction.

And then it went further

Taney's opinion also declared the Missouri Compromise's territorial slavery restriction unconstitutional, reasoning that Congress could not deprive a slaveholder of that claimed property without due process under the Fifth Amendment.

It concluded that Dred Scott and his family had not become free through residence at Fort Snelling, in federal territory where Congress had prohibited slavery.

The familiar "7–2" shorthand flattens the record: every justice wrote separately and they did not all join every proposition in Taney's opinion. Benjamin R. Curtis and John McLean dissented.

Eighty-one days

The immediate judgment left Dred, Harriet, Eliza and Lizzie Scott enslaved. Their owners transferred them to Taylor Blow, who emancipated the family on 26 May 1857, 81 days after the ruling.

The decision itself was never overturned in the ordinary appellate sense. It was constitutionally superseded, and the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause directly repudiated Taney's conclusion.

1:15 p.m., 20 December 1860

At 1:15 p.m. on 20 December 1860, South Carolina's elected secession convention completed a roll-call vote adopting an ordinance that purported to dissolve the state's union with the other United States. All 169 delegates present voted for it.

The ordinance itself was a single paragraph. It repealed South Carolina's 1788 ratification of the U.S. Constitution and declared the existing union dissolved, and it gave no reasons.

Two halls in one day

The decisive vote took place behind closed doors at St. Andrew's Hall in Charleston. The delegates postponed signing and affixing the state seal until a public evening ceremony at South Carolina Institute Hall, before a reported audience of about 3,000.

Convention president David F. Jamison presided, not Governor Francis Pickens, who attended the evening ceremony. After the signing, Jamison proclaimed South Carolina a separate independent nationality.

The reasons came four days later

The explanatory Declaration of Immediate Causes was a separate document, adopted on 24 December after work by a seven-member committee led by Christopher G. Memminger. It centred perceived threats to slavery and failures to enforce fugitive-slave obligations.

Of the 169 delegates in the hall, 153 enslaved people in 1860.

Five days after Antietam

On 22 September 1862, in Washington, Abraham Lincoln signed and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation — five days after the Battle of Antietam left more than 23,000 soldiers killed, wounded or missing.

Lincoln had prepared an emancipation policy earlier but, on William H. Seward's advice, waited for a Union military success before publishing it. The check to Lee's invasion supplied the political opening, and Seward countersigned the September proclamation.

A hundred days to stop

The document warned that on 1 January 1863, people held as slaves in any state or designated part of a state then in rebellion would be free, and that the federal executive — including its military and naval authorities — would recognize and maintain that freedom.

It named no states. Lincoln said he would identify the rebellious states and parts of states in a second proclamation on New Year's Day, which gave the Confederate governments 100 days to cease rebellion before the promised measure took effect.

What the September text still contained

The preliminary proclamation reaffirmed that the war would continue in order to restore constitutional relations, renewed Lincoln's proposal for compensated abolition in the loyal slave states, and said consensual colonization efforts would continue. Adding threatened emancipation did not simply replace the stated war object.

Lincoln also ordered military and naval personnel to enforce existing congressional provisions protecting certain freedom seekers, and people confiscated from rebels, against being returned to slavery. The proclamation freed no one on 22 September.

8 February 1865, in a school building

Gregor Mendel gave the first of two lectures to the Natural History Society of Brünn on 8 February 1865, in the Realschule building at 22 Jánská Street in Brünn, Moravia — now Brno, Czechia. It was a secondary school, not the monastery garden where the peas had grown.

In the first lecture he described his experimental approach and the behaviour of contrasting traits across successive generations of pea hybrids. About forty people were in the room.

The 8 March lecture, and how it landed

A month later Mendel resumed with cell formation, fertilization and seed production, using his crosses to explain how reproductive cells transmit traits between generations.

Contemporary reports do not describe total bafflement. One called the second lecture well received while noting that uncertain points required further investigation, and Mendel himself later recalled encountering divided opinion.

From lecture to print

The lectures were not the publication. Society secretary Gustav Niessl von Mayendorf asked for the manuscript, and the society printed it in its proceedings in 1866, in the volume designated number 4 for 1865.

A handwritten instruction on the surviving manuscript ordered forty personal offprints. The society sent the yearbook carrying the paper to 133 learned institutions.

111 to 38, with 34 not voting

On 13 March 1866 the House of Representatives passed Senate Bill 61, the Civil Rights Bill, by 111 votes to 38. Thirty-four members did not vote on a measure that would define national citizenship after slavery.

The Senate had passed S. 61 on 2 February, and the House took it up amid congressional efforts to counter racially discriminatory post-emancipation laws and to fix the legal status of freedpeople.

What the House changed, and what the bill said

Before passing it, the House struck the broad “civil rights and immunities” wording from section 1 and added a ninth section allowing final appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The amended text declared U.S.-born people not subject to a foreign power to be citizens — expressly excluding “Indians not taxed” — and specified equal rights in contracts, litigation, evidence and property regardless of race or former enslavement. It conferred no voting rights.

Not law that night

Because the House had amended the bill, it had to return to the Senate. The Senate concurred in the House amendments on 15 March without a recorded vote, and only then did the bill reach President Andrew Johnson.

Johnson vetoed it on 27 March. Congress overrode him: the Senate voted 33–15 on 6 April and the House 122–41, with 21 not voting, on 9 April.

Four pages, 16 March 1867

The Lancet issue of 16 March 1867 carried pages 326–329 of Joseph Lister's “On a New Method of Treating Compound Fracture, Abscess, etc., with Observations on the Conditions of Suppuration.” It was the first published account of his carbolic-acid treatment.

The four pages presented four compound-fracture case histories rather than a general survey of surgery. Lister's clinical problem was to prevent putrefaction and suppuration so that an open injury would heal more like a closed fracture.

The boy with the crushed leg

The cases opened with James Greenlees, an eleven-year-old admitted to Glasgow Royal Infirmary on 12 August 1865 after a cart caused an open fracture of his lower leg.

By the time he published in March 1867, Lister had spent roughly two years treating dangerous compound fractures with carbolic-acid preparations, and he drew on Louis Pasteur's work on airborne organisms and putrefaction to explain what he was doing.

Readers had to wait a week for more

The 16 March pages were the opening installment, not the whole report. It continued in The Lancet on 23 March, 30 March, 27 April and 27 July — five installments in all.

This was also not the later paper “On the Antiseptic Principle in the Practice of Surgery,” which followed an August address. The carbolic spray was a later development, and acceptance of the method was neither immediate nor universal.

Winter 1868–69, in Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory

Friedrich Miescher spent the winter of 1868–69 in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's laboratory at the University of Tübingen, analysing leukocytes washed from pus-covered surgical bandages supplied by the university's surgical clinic.

He separated intact cells with roughly 1.5% sodium sulfate — with no centrifuge, waiting for the leukocytes to settle — then removed cellular material and proteins, extracted the nuclei under alkaline conditions and precipitated a substance by adding acid. A letter of 26 February 1869 to his uncle Wilhelm His is the earliest surviving description of the result.

A precipitate that refused to behave like protein

The precipitate was unusually rich in phosphorus and chemically unlike any known protein. Because it came from nuclei, Miescher called it “nuclein”; a surviving preparation measures 2.56 ± 0.06% phosphorus by mass.

In that letter Miescher concluded that the material belonged to no known class of protein. No exact day of successful isolation is recorded; the letter is simply the earliest surviving account of it.

What he had not shown

Miescher did not establish that nuclein was hereditary material, and he described nothing about DNA's structure; the double-helix model came in 1953. Historians also caution that his first material was an impure nucleic-acid preparation, not chemically pure DNA.

There was no immediate public scientific response because the result remained unpublished. Hoppe-Seyler and other researchers repeated the work before the paper appeared in 1871.

The society meeting of 6/18 March 1869

At the Russian Chemical Society's meeting on 6 March 1869 under Russia's Julian calendar — 18 March Gregorian — the secretary Nikolai Menshutkin communicated Mendeleev's work on the relationship between elemental properties and atomic weights.

The communication introduced an arrangement in which elemental properties recurred periodically when elements were ordered principally by atomic weight.

Mendeleev neither attended nor delivered the address. A detailed historical reconstruction says he had left Saint Petersburg to inspect cheese-making cooperatives and had asked Menshutkin to present on his behalf.

One item out of ten

The periodic system was one of ten reports heard that night, most of them on organic chemistry, in a meeting that usually ran about two hours from 8 p.m.

The minutes recorded that discussion was postponed because Mendeleev was absent. The subject was not resumed at the next meeting or apparently at any later society meeting.

The meeting produced little immediate attention among the chemists present; the paper and table subsequently appeared in the society's journal.

What this meeting was not

Several milestones are easily merged: Mendeleev's dated manuscript of 17 February Old Style / 1 March New Style, the society announcement in March, later printing and circulation, and journal publication in May.

The famous detailed predictions of eka-boron, eka-aluminium and eka-silicon were developed principally in Mendeleev's 1871 paper, not delivered in full at this brief communication.

Many English-language accounts print only "March 6" without identifying the calendar, and at least one Russian institutional timeline instead gives 22 February / 6 March.

18 January 1871, inside the siege lines

While Paris was under siege, on 18 January 1871, Wilhelm I of Prussia was ceremonially proclaimed German Emperor in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Otto von Bismarck read the imperial proclamation before the assembled German princes, officials, officers and soldiers.

The 1,391 people present were overwhelmingly from the army besieging the city. The date fell exactly 170 years after the Hohenzollern coronation of 1701.

A title nobody could agree on

Wilhelm accepted the adjectival “German Emperor” reluctantly; he had preferred “Emperor of Germany.” Bismarck recalled that the dispute drove Wilhelm to tears shortly before the ceremony, and that Wilhelm then pointedly ignored him.

Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden closed the ceremony with a cheer for “Kaiser Wilhelm,” deliberately avoiding both contested formulations.

The law was already elsewhere

The ceremony made no constitutional change. The November 1870 accession treaties had brought Bavaria, Württemberg, Baden and southern Hesse into the enlarged federation effective 1 January, and the provisional constitution had been in force since then. The definitive Imperial Constitution was enacted on 16 April and took effect on 4 May 1871.

This was a dynastic and military ceremony, not a popular constituent assembly: Wilhelm was proclaimed, not crowned or elected. The Hall of Mirrors returned to use as a military hospital the following day.

Two documents, 14 February 1876

On 14 February 1876, Alexander Graham Bell's attorney Marcellus Bailey filed a full U.S. patent application titled “Improvement in Telegraphy” at the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. Later the same day, Elisha Gray's attorney filed a caveat describing the transmission of vocal sounds through an electrical circuit, including a liquid variable-resistance transmitter.

Neither inventor walked the papers in himself. Bell later said the filing was made without his prior knowledge or consent, and called the decision fortunate.

A caveat is not an application

Gray did not apply for a telephone patent that day. A caveat was a confidential notice of an inventor's intention to prepare and file an application later.

By the end of the day, Bell had a pending application, while Gray had only a caveat in the Patent Office's confidential files. The apparent overlap between the two approaches prompted the office's scrutiny.

Paperwork before proof

Neither man had transmitted intelligible speech with the devices described when the documents were filed. Bell and Thomas Watson did that on 10 March, and Bell's application had issued as U.S. Patent No. 174,465 three days before that.

Accounts dispute the precise sequence, timing and handling of the papers inside the office, so claims that one lawyer won purely by arriving a few hours earlier deserve caution. The later priority controversy included allegations about Patent Office conduct; the Supreme Court ultimately upheld Bell's patent.

An improvement in telegraphy

The U.S. Patent Office granted Patent No. 174,465 to Alexander Graham Bell on 7 March 1876. Its formal title was “Improvement in Telegraphy,” and the application date printed on it is 14 February 1876.

The grant turned that application into an enforceable patent over methods and apparatus for producing electrical undulations and transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically.

The fifth claim

The patent carried five claims. The fifth covered transmitting vocal or other sounds through electrical undulations corresponding in form to the air vibrations accompanying those sounds.

A patent grants exclusionary legal rights; it does not certify that every component later used in telephones was Bell's, nor that the device worked commercially. The office granted the specific claims printed in No. 174,465.

Three days short of a phone call

Nothing famous was spoken on 7 March. Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted intelligible speech on 10 March, three days after the grant.

In a letter written that day, Bell predicted that telephone wires would reach houses like water or gas pipes. No company was formed and no exchange opened on the day the patent issued.

British application No. 2081

Nicolaus August Otto filed British application No. 2081 for his improved gas-motor engine on 17 May 1876. It was the first filing in an international patent campaign, not a German or U.S. one.

Otto worked through the British patent attorney Charles Denton Abel. The application opened with a provisional specification and was sealed with its final specification on 1 August 1876, for a fourteen-year term.

Four strokes, two revolutions

The protected engine spread intake, compression, ignition and expansion, and exhaust across four piston strokes — which takes two full turns of the crankshaft.

Otto had built a working engine that compressed and burned its charge in one cylinder at Deutz that year, and he and Gasmotoren-Fabrik Deutz moved to protect it before publication and international commercialisation.

Built at Deutz, described earlier in France

Applications followed in Germany on 5 June, France on 9 June, Spain on 27 June and the United States on 13 July, with the versions disclosing differing amounts of technical detail. German Imperial Patent No. 532 dates from 1877.

The filing established a patent claim rather than undisputed priority for the four-stroke concept. Alphonse Beau de Rochas had described the cycle theoretically in an 1862 French patent but apparently did not build an engine, and that prior publication later helped invalidate major German claims.