Alice Pemberton: In nineteen ninety-six, TAM Flight four hundred and two crashes into São Paulo after a thrust reverser deploys during takeoff despite its safeguards. Alice Pemberton: In eighteen ninety-five, the Charleston earthquake shakes Missouri and sends tremors across the central United States. Alice Pemberton: In two thousand and three, Mahathir Mohamad retires as Malaysia's Prime Minister after a generation in power. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the thirty-first of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on a boy given Rome's two greatest names, and the empire that ended with him. Arthur Nightingale on the printmaker who drew beauty, and was chained for drawing a warlord. Judge Marion Calloway on rebels who built a library under their enemy's seal. Vivian Hale on a mountain the money never finished. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: On this day in four seventy-five, a boy in Ravenna took the names of Rome's founder and its first emperor: Romulus Augustus. His empire had ten months left. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Ten months, and not one of them was really his. Romulus Augustus was a child, enthroned by his father Orestes, once secretary to Attila the Hun. That summer Orestes had marched into Ravenna and sent the emperor Julius Nepos fleeing across the Adriatic. Alice Pemberton: So who was actually ruling? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Orestes, and everybody knew it. Even in his own day the boy was mocked as Augustulus, 'little Augustus', and in Greek as Momylus, 'little disgrace.' An anonymous chronicle, the Anonymus Valesianus, puts it flatly: 'Augustulus, who was called Romulus by his parents before he mounted the throne, was made emperor by his father, the patrician Orestes.' Alice Pemberton: Then the barbarians at the gate? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Not at the gate. On the payroll. Rome's own allied troops in Italy demanded land to settle, and Orestes refused. Their commander, Odoacer, killed Orestes, deposed the boy, then did something stranger: he named no successor. He made himself King of Italy and left the western throne empty. Romulus Augustus was spared, and retired to a fortress in Campania. The Western Roman Empire didn't fall with a crash. It ended with a vacancy nobody bothered to fill. Alice Pemberton: On this day in eighteen-oh-six, Kitagawa Utamaro died: the man who made the faces of Japan's floating world famous, and was chained for a different picture altogether. For the biographical sketch, our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: A different picture. But start with a garden. The artist Toriyama Sekien, who taught him, wrote of a little boy playing in his garden. That boy was Kitagawa Utamaro, and that note is nearly all we have of his childhood. Nobody knows his parents. Four places claim his birth; none can prove it. Alice Pemberton: So how does a boy nobody recorded become famous across Japan? Arthur Nightingale: By moving closer. Utamaro's early work was nature: whole illustrated books of insects. The fashion in beauties was tall and graceful, full-length. In the early seventeen-nineties he borrowed a trick from the actor prints and cropped in tight: large-headed pictures of beautiful women, features elongated, close enough to read a mood. Mass-produced prints for townspeople, not considered serious art, and he made more than two thousand of them. And year after year, the same woman and child appear in quiet domestic scenes. We know he married. We know almost nothing else. Alice Pemberton: And the different picture? Arthur Nightingale: In eighteen-oh-four, Kitagawa Utamaro drew the long-dead warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi with his wife and concubines. The authorities called it disrespect. He spent fifty days in manacles. Within two years he was dead. No heirs are recorded. In Paris, the Impressionists would borrow his partial views, his light and shade. At home, his grave lay untended for more than a century, until admirers, not family, came to repair it. Alice Pemberton: On this day in fifteen eighty-seven, Leiden University Library opened: the library of a university founded in rebellion against the King of Spain, under a charter sealed in that same king's name. For the Chamber, our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Judge? Judge Marion Calloway: In that same king's name, and it is superb legal craft. The Dutch were in revolt against Philip the Second. Yet Leiden University's charter carries his red wax seal, signed in his name on William of Orange's advice. A rebel university, wearing the enemy's seal. Alice Pemberton: And the library? Judge Marion Calloway: Same trick. William's first gift was a Royal Bible, the Biblia Regia, which was fitting for a university founded in the king's name. Twelve years on, the books finally had a room: a vaulted chamber in a former convent church on the Rapenburg. Two tables with lecterns, benches either side. Five bookcases with doors. Alice Pemberton: That's barely a reading room. Judge Marion Calloway: And within a decade it printed the Nomenclator, possibly the first printed catalogue of any institutional library in the world. A catalogue is a promise: here is what we hold, here is how you find it. Joseph Scaliger, who taught there, put it in Latin: 'Est hic magna commoditas bibliothecae ut studiosi possint studere.' Here is the great convenience of a library, so that those who want to study can study. A rebellion borrowed a king's seal, and spent it on the right to read. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen forty-one, the drilling stopped on Mount Rushmore, the presidents carved only to the chin, because the money went elsewhere. For the inflection point, our economist, Vivian Hale. Vivian? Vivian Hale: Elsewhere meant rearmament. The original design carried Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln down to the waist. But Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor, died that spring, and his son Lincoln Borglum took over. Then federal funds went to defense, and Mount Rushmore simply stopped. No ceremony, no dedication, just a final drill. Alice Pemberton: So what did the money buy while it lasted? Vivian Hale: Labour, mostly. Nearly four hundred men and women worked the mountain. Each day they climbed seven hundred stairs to the time clock, then were lowered over the face in bosun's chairs on steel cable. Asked what they did, one said, 'I run a jackhammer.' Another: 'I earn eight dollars a day.' A third: 'I am helping to create a memorial.' Alice Pemberton: And the number you'd carve on it? Vivian Hale: Zero. Fourteen years of dynamite and dangling cable, and nobody died. Carver Red Anderson said it best: 'More and more we sensed we were creating a truly great thing, and after a while all of us old hands became truly dedicated to it.' They meant to carve four presidents to the waist. A war decided four faces were enough, and the faces became the monument. Alice Pemberton: On this day a state was wired into existence. At the table: former ambassador Eleanor Shaw, our diplomacy hand; Hugo Carr, biographer of statesmen; and Cooper Vale, our Pacific correspondent. Eleanor? Eleanor Shaw: Wired, word by word. In eighteen sixty-four, in the middle of the Civil War, Nevada telegraphed its entire constitution to Washington. It was among the most expensive telegrams then recorded. Hugo Carr: With an irrevocable ban on slavery written in, as Congress required. On this day President Lincoln proclaimed Nevada a state. Battle Born. Cooper Vale: A constitution by the word. Someone in that telegraph office had a very good week. Alice Pemberton: Another telegram, Hugo. Nineteen twenty-two. Hugo Carr: The one inviting Benito Mussolini to govern. His Blackshirts were converging on Rome, but King Victor Emmanuel the Third wired him in Milan, and Mussolini took the train. On this day he took office as Prime Minister of Italy. Cooper Vale: The March on Rome, by rail. Revolution, timetable permitting. And speaking of relentless: Marble Bar, in Western Australia, from this day in nineteen twenty-three. The thermometer reached a hundred Fahrenheit every single day. It didn't miss for a hundred and sixty days. Eleanor Shaw: The Bureau of Meteorology called it reaching 'the century mark.' Only in Australia is a heatwave scored like cricket. Cooper Vale: The sheep weren't laughing. Drought gripped the tropics, and stock losses were heavy. Alice Pemberton: Hugo, money. Nineteen thirty-eight. Hugo Carr: The New York Stock Exchange's own former president, Richard Whitney, had been convicted in an embezzlement scandal. On this day the Exchange and the SEC unveiled a fifteen-point programme to protect the investing public. Cooper Vale: A better lock, fitted after the landlord robbed the house. Alice Pemberton: Eleanor, the canal. Nineteen fifty-six. Eleanor Shaw: On this day Britain and France began bombing Egypt to retake the Suez Canal, which Gamal Abdel Nasser had nationalised. Anthony Eden told the Commons, 'The action we had to take was bound to be rapid.' So was the retreat, under American, Soviet and UN pressure. Suez proved Britain could no longer act without Washington's consent. Hugo Carr: And a Canadian, Lester Pearson, won the Nobel Peace Prize for tidying up the mess. Alice Pemberton: A telegram, a train, a thermometer and a canal: a thread none of us went looking for. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the thirty-first of October — where in nineteen-oh-three the Purdue Wreck, a train collision in Indianapolis, killed fourteen of Purdue University's football players; where in nineteen fifty-six, as Hungary's revolutionaries revived their banned political parties, the Soviet Politburo decided to crush the revolution; and, more recently, where in two thousand and five astronomers announced that Pluto had company, the moons Nix and Hydra, found in Hubble photographs. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: in nine thirty-two, the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir rode out to fight his own general, Mu'nis, wearing the Prophet's mantle. He lost. A passing peasant buried him under thorns. Mortimer Finch: And the general gloated, I suppose. Humphrey Thwaite: Wept, when they brought him the head. Then the caliph's brother, al-Qahir, was chosen to succeed him. Mortimer Finch: Easy to weep when you're choosing the successor. Humphrey Thwaite: Mortimer, that's the most Abbasid thing you've ever said.