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April and May 1762: two books, a month apart

Du contrat social, ou Principes du droit politique appeared in April 1762 from Marc-Michel Rey in Amsterdam. Émile, ou De l'éducation followed at the end of May.

The first Paris-printed editions of Émile carried a Hague imprint naming Jean Néaulme, concealing Nicolas-Bonaventure Duchesne's Paris production. Néaulme did produce a separate Amsterdam edition, but only after the Paris printing.

9 June in Paris, 19 June in Geneva

On 9 June the Parlement of Paris ordered Émile lacerated and burned and issued an arrest order against Rousseau. The judgment did not order The Social Contract burned with it.

On 12 June, before news of the Paris ruling reached Geneva, the city's Petit Conseil seized copies of both works from booksellers. On 19 June it condemned both, prohibited their printing, sale and distribution, and ordered the executioner to tear and burn them before the town hall.

Anyone in Geneva holding a copy had three days to surrender it, and the council resolved that Rousseau should be arrested if he entered Genevan territory.

The religion, more than the politics

Authorities focused especially on religious teaching. Émile's "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar" advanced natural religion and rejected miracles, and The Social Contract's chapter on civil religion joined theology to political authority.

Geneva also regarded the political argument as an implicit challenge to its own government. Its prosecutor-general, Jean-Robert Tronchin, prepared the conclusions on which the Petit Conseil acted.

Rousseau fled French jurisdiction to escape arrest and could not safely return to Geneva. Thirteen French editions of The Social Contract are reported for 1762–1763.

23 December 1763, in London

At a Royal Society meeting in London on 23 December 1763, Richard Price presented the late Thomas Bayes's manuscript "An Essay towards solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances."

Bayes had died on 7 April 1761, about two years and eight months earlier. Price's covering letter to the fellow John Canton was dated 10 November 1763, but the printed paper records the reading as 23 December — not 24 November.

The problem the essay actually solved

The essay addressed the inverse-probability problem: using the observed number of successes and failures to calculate the probability that the unknown chance of success lies between specified limits.

As communicated it ran to 10 propositions and 3 rules. It appeared in Philosophical Transactions volume 53, pages 370–418; the volume is dated 1763, but the printing history dates actual publication to 1764.

How much of it is Bayes

Bayes's relatives asked Price to examine his papers after he died. Price found the probability manuscript, judged it worth preserving, and prepared an edited and expanded version for the Society, adding an appendix and interpretive material; a supplement followed in December 1764.

Almost all of Bayes's underlying notes are lost, so the surviving evidence does not permit every passage to be assigned confidently between the two men.

Calling this the first announcement of Bayes' theorem is anachronistically broad: the essay presents an inverse-probability result for a particular setting, not the modern identity in its usual general form. A passage David Hartley published in 1749 may describe Bayes's result, so private disclosure could have come earlier.

July 1764, from a press in Livorno

In July 1764 the first edition of Cesare Beccaria's Dei delitti e delle pene was printed in Livorno without naming its author. He was twenty-six.

It came from Marco Coltellini's press, directed by Giuseppe Aubert, and the title page omitted both Beccaria's name and full publication details. A catalogued 1764 Coltellini copy runs to 104 pages.

That title page was almost bare: a title, a date, a small ornament and a motto from Francis Bacon.

What the treatise argued

The book attacked torture, disproportionate punishment, secret accusations and extensive use of capital punishment, arguing that penal law should be public, necessary and directed toward deterrence.

Beccaria was not an unconditional abolitionist in the modern sense. He retained an exceptional allowance for execution when a prisoner's continued existence endangered the state during extreme political crisis.

Sold out before Milan knew

Because the treatise challenged existing criminal procedure and punishment, Beccaria and his Milanese collaborators looked for a discreet printer outside Milan. The manuscript went to Aubert in Livorno on 12 April 1764.

An early biography reports that the entire first printing was gone by August, before the book was widely known in Beccaria's own Milan. Six editions are reported within eighteen months.

Pietro Verri had encouraged the project and helped revise and arrange the manuscript; his exact share in the final wording has been debated.

16 August 1765 at Allahabad

At Allahabad on 16 August 1765, Shuja-ud-Daula, Nawab Wazir of Awadh, concluded peace with Robert Clive and John Carnac, acting for the East India Company and for Bengal's nawab Najm-ud-Daula.

Shah Alam II was not a principal contracting party. His approval was signified by his seal at the head of the bilingual document, and Kora with the portion of Allahabad he already held were reserved as an imperial demesne.

Fifty lakhs, in instalments

The treaty restored Shuja-ud-Daula to his dominions in exchange for a fifty-lakh-rupee indemnity. Twelve lakhs in money plus jewels valued at eight lakhs were delivered at signing, five lakhs fell due a month later and twenty-five lakhs after that, with the whole to be discharged within thirteen months.

The Company could hold Chunar until the indemnity was fully paid.

Eleven articles, and what they bound

Article 2 made military assistance reciprocal between Awadh and the Company–Bengal side, with Shuja responsible for the extraordinary cost when Company forces served him. Another article opened his entire dominions to Company trade without duties.

Company forces were to withdraw after execution of the treaty, except at Chunar and, if requested, for Shah Alam's protection at Allahabad. Balwant Singh was to continue in Banaras, Ghazipur and his existing districts on payment of the established revenue.

"Treaty of Allahabad" is used loosely for a cluster of August 1765 arrangements. The imperial farman granting the Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa is a separate instrument, dated 12 August.

29 May 1766, before the summer recess

The Royal Society in London heard the first part of Henry Cavendish's investigation on 29 May 1766, having received it on 12 May. It was later published as "Three Papers, Containing Experiments on Factitious Air."

This first part concerned "inflammable air" made by reacting iron, zinc or tin with dilute sulfuric acid or hydrochloric acid.

The same air from three metals

Cavendish found that changing the metal, or using either acid, produced air with consistent measurable properties. That supported treating it as a particular species of air rather than ordinary atmospheric air.

He examined its production, combustibility and specific gravity, comparing gases by weighing a bladder before and after it was emptied. He reported a density about 7 to 11 times lighter than common air, depending on the calculation and the experimental source.

Explained as escaping phlogiston

Cavendish interpreted the result within phlogiston theory, proposing that the metal's phlogiston escaped and formed inflammable air.

The May reading was only the first installment. The second and third parts were read on 6 and 13 November, and all three appeared together in Philosophical Transactions volume 56, pages 141–184.

The 1766 paper did not report that burning inflammable air produces water; those experiments belong to Cavendish's 1784 paper "Experiments on Air." Calling him the discoverer of hydrogen is a retrospective convention — earlier experimenters had produced the gas, and he did not identify it as a modern chemical element.

2 December 1766: approved, and sent to the printer

On 2 December 1766, Kungl. Maj:t — the Council of the Realm acting as the government, rather than the king personally — approved the Diet's 15 October proposal and ordered the ordinance implemented and printed.

Distribution was not immediate. The Christmas break delayed public announcement until February 1767.

Two rights in one mechanism

The ordinance ended the Chancellery's general pre-publication examination of domestic writing and transferred legal responsibility to authors and printers.

It also established the right to consult and reproduce records such as government decisions, minutes and investigations — the foundation of Sweden's principle of public access to official documents. Citizens could inspect government records and then print what they found.

UNESCO recognizes it as the world's first government-sponsored declaration of freedom of the press and the first legislation guaranteeing free communication of information.

What the compromise left standing

Three of the four estates carried the proposal; the nobility opposed the public-record provisions. Because of that, and because the procedural rules required confirmation at a later Diet, the ordinance's constitutional status was left unsettled — paragraph 14 promised constitutional-style permanence without declaring the ordinance a constitution.

It did not eliminate every form of censorship. Theological manuscripts still required consistory approval, and imported literature remained subject to review.

Anders Chydenius is commonly credited as principal drafter, but the National Library's scholarly history says the evidence is not indisputable and that the final text was edited by many hands; the surviving record names Leonard De la Rose as official author of the successful draft.

7 April 1767, at Hua Ro

On the conventional Thai chronology, 7 April 1767 is the day Burmese troops burned the base of Ayutthaya's wall at Hua Ro near Mahachai Fort, while artillery fired into the city from the surrounding camps.

Sappers under Ne Myo Thihapate had undermined the northeastern defences and burned the supporting material beneath the wall. By dusk part of it had collapsed.

At about 8 p.m. a signal began the general assault, and troops entered through the breach and at other points around the defences.

Fires bright as day

Once inside, the attackers set fire to houses, monasteries and the royal-palace precinct, plundered public and private property and seized inhabitants. Chronicles say the fires made the night city as bright as day.

Those chronicles report about 30,000 captives, among them a monk, princes and novices; the former king Uthumphon, by then a Buddhist monk, is listed among the high-ranking prisoners. The totals are figures reported by chronicles, not modern counts.

Which night, and what became of the king

The 7 April date is conventional rather than unanimously attested. A contemporary Burmese victory poem dates the overrunning of the city and palace to the night of 8 April, other Burmese chronicles place the breach about three days later, and historians attribute the discrepancy to different definitions of when the city was "taken" or to recording and calendar-conversion problems.

That poem says King Ekkathat was shot while attempting to escape. Other accounts have him dying of starvation after reaching the countryside; the manner, location and date of his death are disputed.

The siege had run a year and two months in the cited Thai account. The main Burmese army began leaving with captives and booty after roughly nine or ten days, and about 3,000 Burmese–Mon troops reportedly remained at Pho Sam Ton.

3 July 1769: patent No. 931

On 3 July 1769 Richard Arkwright took out English patent No. 931 for a machine described as making weft or yarn from cotton, flax and wool. The enrolled specification survives in the UK National Archives as C 73/13 m31.

The mechanism drafted fibres through successive pairs of rollers turning at increasing speeds, then twisted and wound the resulting yarn with flyers and bobbins.

On the surviving prototype, four pairs of rollers stretched four threads at once, the final pair turning more than six times as fast as the first.

Not yet a water frame

The 1769 arrangement was intended to be driven by a horse mill. It became known as the water frame only after Arkwright applied water power at Cromford in 1771.

The patent wording covered "weft or yarn", but the Science Museum reports that the surviving prototype produced the hard, strong warp yarn a loom needs lengthwise, rather than soft weft. The claim and the demonstrated machine are not the same thing.

Whose invention it was

Arkwright was the sole named patentee. The prototype was built with the help of the Warrington clockmaker John Kay — a different man from the flying-shuttle inventor of the same name — who did not share the patent.

The roller-drawing principle had already been patented by Lewis Paul in 1738, and Thomas Highs later claimed he had devised roller-spinning machinery before Arkwright. The attribution remains contested.

What 3 July produced was a patent monopoly over the claimed machinery, running for the ordinary English term of fourteen years.

Six in the morning, 19 April 1770

At 6 a.m. on 19 April 1770, after slowing during the dark and taking a deep sounding, Endeavour's crew saw land extending from northeast to west at an estimated distance of five or six leagues — roughly 28 to 33 kilometres.

The pre-dawn sounding had run out 130 fathoms, about 238 metres, without reaching bottom. When the land came into view the water was 80 fathoms deep.

Named for the officer of the watch

Second Lieutenant Zachary Hicks, the officer of the watch, was credited with first seeing the land. Lieutenant James Cook named the southernmost point then visible "Point Hicks" and recorded its estimated latitude and longitude.

Endeavour stayed well offshore and then bore northeast along the coast. Nobody landed near Point Hicks that day; later that morning Joseph Banks described sloping, partly wooded hills interspersed with sandy areas.

Which morning, and which headland

The National Museum of Australia conventionally dates the sighting to 19 April. Cook's nautical day, his unadjusted westward calendar and later conversions to local civil time have left the same dawn labelled 18, 19 or 20 April in reputable accounts.

Identifying Cook's Point Hicks with today's Munda Bubul/Point Hicks is disputed. His plotted coordinates fall in the sea on modern charts, and some researchers argue Hicks saw a more elevated inland feature or another headland.

This was the first recorded European sighting of Australia's eastern coastline. Aboriginal peoples had lived on the continent for tens of thousands of years, and Europeans had previously reached other Australian coasts.

22 August 1770, by Cook's journal

On 22 August 1770 by his own journal, after Endeavour anchored inside a possible strait near Cape York, James Cook landed on Possession Island with Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and a party of sailors.

Cook climbed the island's highest hill, saw no land between southwest and west-southwest, and concluded that a passage probably existed.

He recorded that Indigenous people watched the landing and withdrew as his party approached, and noted smoke across the surrounding islands as evidence that they were inhabited.

Colours, and three volleys

Cook raised British colours and, in George III's name, claimed the coast from latitude 38° south to Cape York as New South Wales, including its bays, harbours, rivers and islands.

His party then fired three volleys of small arms, answered by three volleys from Endeavour. A rapid ebb tide delayed their return to the ship.

What the ceremony settled, and what it did not

Admiralty instructions authorized territorial claims but called for Indigenous consent where land was inhabited, and Cook did not record obtaining it. In the manuscript he crossed out wording suggesting that, by European rules of discovery, the coast therefore belonged to Britain.

On the following journal day Endeavour reached open water west of Cape York. Cook then concluded that New Holland and New Guinea were separate lands and named the route Endeavour Strait — a finding in the next entry, not part of the ceremony.

The date carries a date-line problem of its own: 22 August is Cook's recorded, unadjusted date, and 23 August the corresponding local civil date.

22 June 1772, Court of King's Bench

On 22 June 1772, in the Court of King's Bench, Lord Mansfield delivered judgment on the return to a writ of habeas corpus concerning Captain John Knowles's detention of James Somerset aboard the Ann and Mary.

Somerset's godparents had obtained the writ after Charles Steuart had him seized following an escape and confined on a Jamaica-bound ship. The litigation was formally against the captain holding him, not against Steuart.

A narrow question, narrowly answered

Mansfield framed the immediate question narrowly: whether the stated reason for detaining Somerset so that he could be sold abroad was legally sufficient.

He held that such an exercise of a master's power required positive law, said he could not find that this detention was allowed by English law, and ordered Somerset discharged. He had repeatedly tried to avoid giving judgment at all, including by urging Steuart to free Somerset or permit a private settlement.

What it stopped, and how it was read

The judgment prevented Steuart and Knowles from forcibly transporting Somerset out of England for sale in Jamaica. It did not expressly abolish every form of slavery or compelled service in England.

Five days later a newspaper reported that nearly 200 Black people celebrated at a Westminster public house with toasts and a ball. Five advocates had appeared for Somerset: William Davy, John Glynn, Francis Hargrave, James Mansfield and John Alleyne.

The last known evidence of Somerset is a letter indicating that, eighteen days after the ruling, he was telling another enslaved man that Mansfield had given them freedom.

17 January 1773, about a quarter past eleven

At about 11:15 a.m. on 17 January 1773, HMS Resolution crossed south of the Antarctic Circle — the first recorded ship to do so. HMS Adventure, commanded by Tobias Furneaux, was in company.

Cook's observed noon position was 66°36′ south, four and a half miles beyond the circle. He recorded that no ship was known to have crossed it before.

Ice islands, whales and petrels

The ships met numerous ice islands and loose ice as they continued south, with whales moving among them and Antarctic petrels arriving in flights of twenty or thirty.

Some sailors worried that stored ice would expand and burst its casks as it melted. An experiment aboard demonstrated the opposite.

Turned north within hours

By that evening, or the next nautical journal period, an apparently continuous field of ice blocked the route south, unbroken from east-southeast to west-southwest. The ships turned north rather than risk being trapped.

Crossing the circle was not the same as reaching or seeing Antarctica; the expedition stayed at sea. This was the first of three crossings on the voyage, and not Cook's farthest south — he reached 71°10′ south on 30 January 1774.