Read history

Liftoff at 08:43 UTC

A Titan IVB/Centaur lifted Cassini–Huygens from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, at 08:43 UTC on 15 October 1997 — 4:43 a.m. local time.

The planned attempt two days earlier, on 13 October, had been scrubbed because of upper-level winds and ground-equipment or computer concerns.

The payload combined NASA's Cassini Saturn orbiter, ESA's Huygens Titan probe and a high-gain antenna supplied by the Italian Space Agency.

Forty-two minutes to separation

The Titan and Centaur completed their burns, and the Centaur separated from the spacecraft 42 minutes and 40 seconds after liftoff.

Cassini established communications through NASA's Deep Space Network station near Canberra, Australia, and returned good signals.

The stack weighed 5,712 kilograms — 12,593 pounds — at launch, counting fuel, Huygens and the adapter.

Too heavy to aim at Saturn

The launch did not put the spacecraft on a direct route. Cassini's mass required two Venus flybys plus Earth and Jupiter gravity assists, and the first encounter ahead of it was Venus.

The cruise to Saturn ran roughly 6.7 years.

One figure that circulates with this launch is the wrong one: $3.26 billion was approximately the original projected total, while NASA's completed-mission accounting gives $3.9 billion — $2.5 billion before launch and $1.4 billion after.

An institution born from a personnel decision

On 1 June 1998 the appointments of the ECB's president, vice-president and four other Executive Board members took effect, and with them both the European Central Bank and the European System of Central Banks were established.

The Treaty provided that the two would come into being as soon as the Executive Board was appointed by common accord of the participating governments.

Willem Frederik “Wim” Duisenberg took office as the ECB's first president on a formal eight-year appointment, with Christian Noyer as vice-president; Duisenberg publicly maintained that any early retirement would be his own decision.

The predecessor went into liquidation

The ECB replaced the European Monetary Institute, which Duisenberg had headed, and inherited its preparatory work, infrastructure and staff. The EMI did not simply change its name: it went into liquidation, and its assets and liabilities passed automatically to the ECB.

The Executive Board began allocating responsibilities on 2 June and prepared the first Governing Council and General Council meetings, held on 9 June.

Eleven member states were by then preparing to adopt the euro.

What 1 June 1998 was not

Establishing the bank was not introducing the euro or starting the single monetary policy; both came on 1 January 1999. The new institution had about seven months to test systems and settle the rules a multinational monetary policy would run on.

The system created that day is also not the Eurosystem. The ESCB comprises the ECB and the national central banks of all then-EU member states, while the Eurosystem is the ECB plus the central banks of euro-area members.

Nor was the ECB an EU institution in the formal sense in 1998; it received that status only under the Lisbon Treaty.

Brussels, the last day of 1998

The Council of the European Union met in Brussels on 31 December 1998 and adopted the irrevocable conversion rates between the euro and the national currency units of the eleven initial participating states.

The Treaty required one euro to replace one ECU without changing the ECU's external value, so the rates had to wait for that day's final official ECU exchange rates, calculated while preserving the pre-announced ERM bilateral central rates.

The Council acted on a European Commission proposal after consulting the ECB; president Wim Duisenberg delivered the bank's opinion after its Governing Council approved it by teleconference.

Six significant figures apiece

Council Regulation 2866/98 set each rate to six significant figures: 1.95583 German marks, 6.55957 French francs, 1,936.27 Italian lire, 0.787564 Irish pounds, 2.20371 Dutch guilders, 40.3399 Belgian and Luxembourg francs, 166.386 Spanish pesetas, 13.7603 Austrian schillings, 200.482 Portuguese escudos and 5.94573 Finnish marks.

The regulation entered into force on 1 January 1999, covering almost 300 million people across eleven countries.

For about three and a half days — from the afternoon of 31 December to the opening of markets on 4 January — banks and public authorities converted electronic records, payment systems and large amounts of public debt.

Irrevocable, not a transitional peg

The rates were irrevocable. The eleven national currencies did not continue as independent currencies at adjustable pegs: from 1 January the euro replaced them, and their units became fixed subdivisions of it.

Nothing about the euro's floating market rate against the dollar, yen or pound sterling was decided that night.

No euro cash appeared either. National banknotes and coins kept circulating and remained legal tender in their own territories under the transitional arrangements; euro notes and coins arrived in 2002.

Three instruments, deposited in Missouri

On 12 March 1999, at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, the Czech, Hungarian and Polish foreign ministers deposited their countries' instruments of accession to the North Atlantic Treaty with the United States, the treaty's depositary.

Jan Kavan, János Martonyi and Bronisław Geremek handed them over; Secretary of State Madeleine Albright received them. The recorded ceremony ran 60 minutes.

Czechoslovak-born Albright marked the moment with one word: “Hallelujah.”

Membership from the moment of deposit

Deposit of the instruments made the three states NATO members, taking the Alliance from 16 countries to 19.

Accession runs through Article 10 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which required each state to become a party by depositing an instrument with the U.S. government once existing members had ratified the accession protocols and the invitees had completed their domestic procedures.

Article 14, which a NATO news caption associated with the ceremony, concerns custody of the treaty text instead.

The photographed moment came four days later

The flags went up at NATO headquarters in Brussels on 16 March, alongside the first special North Atlantic Council meeting of 19 allies. The legal accession had already happened in Missouri.

NATO calls these the first former Warsaw Pact members to join. The former East German Länder had come under NATO through German reunification in 1990, but East Germany did not accede as a surviving independent state.

Nor did the Soviet Union dissolve the year after the Warsaw Pact ended: both happened in 1991, the USSR formally ceasing to exist on 26 December.

Signed at Kumanovo while aircraft were still flying

At Kumanovo in Macedonia on 9 June 1999, KFOR commander Lieutenant General Mike Jackson and representatives of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Serbia signed the Military Technical Agreement.

Colonel General Svetozar Marjanović of the VJ General Staff signed for the Yugoslav government and Obrad Stevanović for the Serbian Interior Ministry. The document's named parties were KFOR and the governments of FR Yugoslavia and the Republic of Serbia.

The signing took place at a military airfield while NATO aircraft were still conducting operations.

Eleven days to leave, and two buffer zones

The agreement entered into force upon signature. It required Yugoslav army, Serbian police and associated forces to stop hostile acts and begin a phased, verifiable withdrawal from Kosovo, to be complete 11 days after entry into force.

It established a Ground Safety Zone 5 kilometres deep and an Air Safety Zone 25 kilometres deep beyond Kosovo's boundary into the rest of FRY territory.

It authorized KFOR to deploy after the anticipated Security Council resolution, and made the KFOR commander the final authority on what the agreement meant.

Why the air campaign kept running

Signature did not switch off the bombing. The agreement tied suspension of air strikes to verification that withdrawal had begun; NATO suspended the campaign on 10 June after verifying movement by Yugoslav forces, and formally terminated it on 20 June after confirming the withdrawal.

Security Council Resolution 1244, which authorized the international civil and security presences, was adopted on 10 June by 14 votes to none with one abstention. KFOR began entering Kosovo on 12 June.

The executed agreement and its UN-filed signature page are dated 9 June; some NATO archival timelines place the announcement under 10 June, which is where the one-day discrepancy in secondary accounts comes from.

One round, and no runoff

Russians voted in an early presidential election on 26 March 2000, across all 89 federal subjects — including 12 of Chechnya's 15 districts — and at polling stations abroad.

Acting President Vladimir Putin took a first-round majority with 39,740,434 votes, 52.94%. Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov received 21,928,471 votes, 29.21%, and Yabloko's Grigory Yavlinsky 4,351,452, 5.80%.

Turnout was 68.74% — more than 75 million people, at over 94,000 polling stations.

Why the election came early

Boris Yeltsin resigned on 31 December 1999. Under the constitution, Prime Minister Putin assumed presidential duties, and an early election was scheduled for 26 March.

Putin ran as a self-nominated candidate backed by pro-Kremlin forces.

Eleven names were on the ballot, not twelve: twelve candidates were registered, but Yevgeny Savostyanov withdrew shortly before the deadline.

What the observers wrote down

International observers generally rated the polling orderly while documenting family voting, proxy voting, counting shortcuts, incumbency advantages and an imbalanced media environment.

OSCE teams encountered family voting at 82% and proxy voting at 34% of the stations they visited. The organization found that the irregularities it observed did not appear to change the outcome, while identifying serious concerns about administrative resources, media pressure and voting secrecy; it deployed no observers inside Chechnya.

“Elected on 26 March” is conventional shorthand. The Central Election Commission formally declared Putin elected on 5 April, and he took office on 7 May.

Docked at 3:21, inside at 4:23

Two days after launching from Baikonur, Soyuz TM-31 docked with the aft port of the ISS's Zvezda service module at 3:21 a.m. CST on 2 November 2000, carrying William Shepherd, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev.

Pressure equalization and a stubborn Soyuz hatch held them up for about an hour; the station hatch opened at 4:23.

Krikalev went through first, switching on lights as he floated into the dark Zvezda module. Gidzenko and Shepherd followed.

A small outpost with the lights just on

The station then consisted of three modules — Zarya, Unity and Zvezda — with less than 200 cubic metres of pressurized volume and about 3 kilowatts of available electrical power.

Zvezda had supplied the living quarters, life-support capability and docking port a permanent crew needed. The three residents planned a stay of about four months.

They began at once installing and activating life-support, communications and other equipment, and preparing for resupply and visiting assembly missions.

Which day "Expedition 1 begins" means

The phrase covers two different dates. NASA lists the launch as 31 October and the docking as 2 November; the event dated here is the docking, the entry and the start of continuous occupancy.

The milestone was uninterrupted occupancy of the ISS, not the first long human stay aboard any space station — Soviet and Russian stations had hosted long-duration crews earlier.

A previous shuttle crew had left a sign on Zvezda's toilet reading, “Sanitized for your safety and health.”

Called for Gore, called for Bush, called off

Americans voted for presidential electors on 7 November 2000 in a contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. Neither could be identified as the winner, because Florida and its decisive 25 electoral votes remained unresolved.

Television networks projected Florida for Gore, withdrew that projection, projected Florida and the presidency for Bush after midnight, then withdrew that call too. NBC's documented times were 7:49 p.m., 10:16 p.m., 2:17 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. Eastern.

Tom Brokaw's summary was that the network had an omelet all over its suits; the projections were news judgments, not official declarations of a president-elect.

A concession made and taken back

After the networks projected Bush the winner, Gore telephoned him to concede. As Bush's reported Florida lead collapsed, Gore called again and withdrew the concession before delivering any public speech.

He was on his way to give that speech when an aide learned the Florida gap had fallen from tens of thousands of votes to fewer than 1,000.

By early on 8 November the networks had pulled their Bush projection, Gore had pulled his private concession, and the country had no president-elect.

Where 537 actually comes from

On 8 November the Florida Division of Elections reported Bush ahead by 1,784 votes. That was under the state's one-half-of-one-percent threshold, so Florida began an automatic machine recount; Gore requested manual recounts in four counties on 9 November.

The famous 537-vote margin — 2,912,790 to 2,912,253 — belongs to Florida's certification on 26 November, not to election night.

Bush v. Gore followed on 12 December, more than a month after the vote, and reversed the 8 December state-court recount order rather than conducting or certifying any recount. The final Electoral College result was Bush 271, Gore 266, with 270 required.

Membership on a thirty-day clock

China's WTO accession protocol entered into force on 11 December 2001, making the People's Republic of China the organization's 143rd member.

The Ministerial Conference had approved the accession package by consensus on 10 November, and China deposited its ratification with director-general Mike Moore at the Doha ministerial meeting on 11 November.

The protocol provided that it would enter into force on the 30th day following acceptance, which is where the December date comes from.

What took effect with it

The accession package incorporated China's schedules of commitments on market access for goods and services, together with the accession working-party report.

On accession China fully applied the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, rather than receiving a further general transition period.

Many of its tariff and services commitments were phased schedules rather than reforms switched on in final form overnight.

Two lines of shorthand that do not survive the text

The protocol did not designate China a non-market economy for 15 years. It authorized special rules for determining normal value in anti-dumping cases, subject to producer and industry findings; the WTO Appellate Body emphasized that those provisions concerned normal-value methodology. They expired on 11 December 2016.

China also did not become a GATT observer in 1986. It became an observer in 1982 and applied in 1986 to resume contracting-party status — the start of roughly 15 years of accession negotiation.

Hong Kong, China and Macao, China kept their own separate-customs-territory memberships; China's accession did not absorb them.

A statement with the numbers left out

On 23 October 2001 the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning announced that it had witnessed the Provisional IRA put a quantity of arms completely beyond use.

The IICD identified the material only as arms, ammunition and explosives and confirmed that it had been handled under the agreed decommissioning scheme and regulations. Chairman John de Chastelain signed with fellow commissioners Tauno Nieminen and Andrew D. Sens.

The commission withheld the quantity, location, method and inventory, saying further disclosure would not advance the process of putting all arms beyond use.

Why it came that week

The IRA and the IICD had agreed on 6 August on a verifiable method for putting weapons beyond use, and disputes over decommissioning had brought Northern Ireland's devolved institutions close to collapse.

In its own statement the IRA said it had implemented that scheme, called the move unprecedented, and said it acted to save the peace process — while giving up none of its political objectives.

The next day, 24 October, David Trimble moved to restore the three Ulster Unionist ministers who had left the Northern Ireland Executive.

Not disarmament, and not the end

The listing has the IRA beginning disarmament and thereby ending a decades-long conflict. This was the first of four verified acts — October 2001, April 2002, October 2003 and September 2005 — and not complete disarmament.

The IRA formally ended its armed campaign in July 2005, after three of those acts had already happened. The chronology runs the opposite way from accounts in which the 2005 declaration was a prerequisite for decommissioning.

The IICD's language was that weapons were put beyond use, not surrendered to the British government. Dissident republican groups remained active, and the act relieved an acute institutional crisis rather than ending violence.

15 January 2001: 'Wikipedia is up!'

Wikipedia opened at wikipedia.com on 15 January 2001 — one English-language site, running on servers supplied by the for-profit web company Bomis. Larry Sanger announced it to the Nupedia mailing list under the subject line 'Wikipedia is up!' and invited recipients to add a short article.

The earliest recovered database revision from launch day is an edit to the homepage announcing the new site — with a hole in the story: early revision records were lost, so the earliest surviving edit is not necessarily the first one typed.

An escape hatch from Nupedia

Wikipedia began as a workaround. Nupedia, the expert-reviewed encyclopedia Jimmy Wales had founded through Bomis with Sanger as editor-in-chief, produced articles slowly through its multi-stage review. After programmer Ben Kovitz explained the wiki concept to Sanger on 2 January, Sanger proposed a wiki as a fast, open way to develop material — launched under its own name partly out of concern about tying the experiment too closely to Nupedia.

The difference showed immediately: anyone could create or revise entries directly, without expert review. Contributors produced about 600 articles within roughly two weeks, and more than 1,000 by mid-February — far outpacing Nupedia's pipeline.

Who founded it depends on what you count

The founder titles later became contentious. What contemporary evidence securely supports: Wales initiated and funded the project; Sanger proposed the wiki implementation, named it, announced it, and organized its early community and editorial norms. The tidy retrospective split — Wales the vision, Sanger the technology — flattens overlapping contributions.

Nothing launched that day resembled today's institution. The multilingual editions, the .org address, and the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation all came later; on 15 January 2001, Wikipedia was a single English-language site inviting strangers to write an encyclopedia.

A date produced by an arithmetic clause

The Rome Statute entered into force on 1 July 2002 under its Article 126. With it, Article 1's provision establishing a permanent International Criminal Court became operative, and the Court acquired international legal personality under Article 4.

The threshold had been crossed nearly three months earlier: on 11 April, ten states deposited ratification instruments simultaneously, taking the total to 66 against the 60 required.

Article 126 set entry into force for the first day of the month after the sixtieth day following that deposit, which is how the date landed on 1 July.

Legally alive, operationally empty

The Court existed and the Statute bound its parties, but no judges were sitting and no trial could begin. The Preparatory Commission opened its tenth and final session that day to finish practical and technical arrangements.

The first Assembly of States Parties met in September 2002, and the first 18 judges were elected in 2003.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan marked the entry into force with a statement emphasizing prosecution when national states were unable or unwilling to act.

The line the date drew

1 July became a jurisdictional boundary: the Court cannot prosecute conduct occurring before that day under the Statute's ordinary jurisdiction.

The Court is complementary to national jurisdictions rather than a replacement for domestic courts, and it is independent of the United Nations, though the Statute provides for a formal relationship with the UN.

One detail often published as settled is not: the 1998 Rome adoption result of 120 in favour, 7 against and 21 abstentions came from an unrecorded vote. China, Israel and the United States publicly explained negative votes, but the UN did not record the identities of all seven opposing delegations.