Alice Pemberton: In nineteen ninety-seven, Cassini–Huygens launches for Saturn, carrying the probe that will make humanity’s first landing on Titan. Alice Pemberton: In nine sixty-one, Al-Hakam the Second becomes caliph of Córdoba and builds a library that makes the city a centre of learning. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen eighty-nine, Wayne Gretzky becomes the NHL's all-time leading points scorer. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the fifteenth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish puts a queen in the dock; Arthur Nightingale follows an anatomist from a gibbet to a city gate; Margaux Delacroix reviews a computer manual as a work of art; Judge Marion Calloway explains how a pope deleted ten days. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: A queen of France stands in the dock, and the court won't even use her name. For the front page — our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Not her name. Her late husband's. The Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris tried Marie Antoinette as ‘the widow Capet’, and on this day in seventeen ninety-three she was halfway through it. Some forty witnesses faced her, and the charges were conspiring with foreign powers, draining the treasury, and high treason. Alice Pemberton: Draining the treasury — was that a real charge, or a reputation? Professor Edmund Cavendish: A reputation with a nickname. Pamphleteers had spent years calling her profligate, promiscuous, a friend to her native Austria. She became Madame Déficit. She was falsely accused of defrauding the Crown's jewellers in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. The charge was false; the damage wasn't. Alice Pemberton: And when did the tribunal decide? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Before dawn the next morning, at about four: guilty on every principal charge, and death. By about a quarter past noon that same day, Marie Antoinette was on the guillotine. She had come to France at fourteen to seal an alliance with Austria, and she died convicted of conspiring with France's enemies. The pamphlets had tried her for years. The tribunal needed two days. Alice Pemberton: On this day in fifteen sixty-four, the man who mapped the human body collapsed at a city gate on a Greek island. For the biographical sketch — our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: The island was Zakynthos, then Venetian. Andreas Vesalius lay sick in the hold of a ship coming home from Jerusalem. It had been becalmed for more than forty days, with water and food running out and the dead going over the side. Alice Pemberton: Before the ship — who was he? Arthur Nightingale: A Brussels boy, from a family that had doctored emperors. In Paris he was often found among dug-up bones in the charnel houses of the Cemetery of the Innocents. And he's said to have built his first skeleton from bones stolen off a gibbet. Alice Pemberton: When did anyone take him seriously? Arthur Nightingale: The day he graduated. Padua offered him its chair of surgery and anatomy on the spot. Until then, anatomy meant a professor reading Galen, the ancient authority, while a barber-surgeon dissected an animal to order — and no one tried to confirm a word of it. Vesalius did. Alice Pemberton: What did the checking produce? Arthur Nightingale: First, a book of anatomical tables, drawn with Johan van Calcar, a pupil of Titian. Then the masterpiece: De Humani Corporis Fabrica — On the Fabric of the Human Body, in seven books. It is why Andreas Vesalius is called the founder of modern anatomy. Alice Pemberton: So how did Vesalius come to be on that ship? Arthur Nightingale: That pilgrimage was his last journey. A court physician in Cleves, Reiner Solenander, wrote down the end: there was no shipwreck. The ship made port. Vesalius came ashore weak and frail, walked slowly toward the city gate, and collapsed there, at forty-nine. The man who taught Europe to look inside the body left us still arguing over what was wrong with his own. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen fifty-six, IBM published a manual for a language nobody could run yet. For the Gallery — our critic of arts and culture, Margaux Delacroix. Margaux? Margaux Delacroix: Nobody could run it yet, and I adore that. The FORTRAN Programmer's Reference Manual, fifty-one pages from IBM, opens with a line of pure confidence: ‘This manual supersedes all earlier information about the FORTRAN system.’ It existed so people could start writing FORTRAN before there was anything to read it. Alice Pemberton: A gallery piece, though? It's a manual. Margaux Delacroix: It's a translation. FORTRAN stood for Formula Translating System. You wrote something close to the mathematics, and the machine wrote the machine code. Before that, programmers on the IBM seven-oh-four wrote assembly by hand. The art is in the discipline: its code had to be lean enough that those hand-coders would accept it. They did. Alice Pemberton: Who was the artist? Margaux Delacroix: John Backus, who pitched it to his boss in a letter and later confessed the real motive: ‘Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn't like writing programs.’ Laziness, it turns out, is wonderfully durable. A language invented to dodge drudgery is still the one used to benchmark and rank the fastest supercomputers on Earth. Alice Pemberton: On this day in fifteen eighty-two, Catholic Europe woke up on Friday the fifteenth of October. The day before had been the fourth. From the archive — our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Judge? Judge Marion Calloway: The fourth — and the ten days between were removed by decree. The instrument was a papal bull, Inter gravissimas, from Pope Gregory the Thirteenth, and it is admirably blunt: ‘ten days shall be removed from the month of October.’ The old Julian calendar ran slightly long, and over the centuries it had drifted, dragging the date of Easter with it. Alice Pemberton: Could a pope actually do that to a whole continent? Judge Marion Calloway: That's the beautiful legal problem. No. The bull bound the Church and the Papal States, and nothing else; the civil calendar needed civil rulers. Philip the Second of Spain decreed it, Anna Jagiellon's Poland-Lithuania followed, and the Protestants and the Orthodox simply declined. The Christian world's Easters came apart. Alice Pemberton: So Gregory couldn't command a king — what could he command? Judge Marion Calloway: The printers. The bull forbade anyone to print the new calendar without licence, on pain of excommunication. Some states held out into the twentieth century. By then they had thirteen days to lose. And the fifteenth of October, fifteen eighty-two, is the first day of the calendar on your wall. Alice Pemberton: Round the table: our science and medicine man, Doc Sullivan; our diplomacy hand, the former ambassador Eleanor Shaw; and our markets man, Joe Marchetti. Eleanor, start us at sea. Eleanor Shaw: At sea, then. On this day in eighteen fifteen, Napoleon arrived off Saint Helena aboard HMS Northumberland. The allies had learned from Elba, which he escaped within ten months. This time they chose a speck in the South Atlantic, and it held him until he died. Joe Marchetti: Cheapest insurance in Europe. Mine's a beginning: in nineteen thirty-two, J.R.D. Tata flew airmail from Karachi to Bombay in a single-engine Puss Moth — the first flight of what became Air India. In his words: ‘As we hummed towards our destination at a dazzling hundred miles an hour, I breathed a silent prayer.’ Doc Sullivan: A dazzling hundred. I've been overtaken by faster ambulances. Mine's older: by tradition, the poet Lucretius died on this day in fifty-five BC, the very day the young Virgil came of age. His On the Nature of Things put the universe into atoms and verse. Cicero wrote to his brother that it was ‘rich in brilliant genius, yet highly artistic.’ Eleanor Shaw: And the death itself, Doc? Doc Sullivan: Saint Jerome, writing four centuries later, says a love potion drove him mad and he took his own life. Most scholars call that anti-Epicurean spin. Joe Marchetti: The original hatchet job. On this day in nineteen sixty-six, in Oakland, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. The open guns got the headlines; the Ten-Point Program came from canvassing their neighbours. Doc Sullivan: And one answer from those neighbours: free breakfast for children. Eleanor Shaw: By nineteen sixty-nine, J. Edgar Hoover was calling the party ‘the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.’ The FBI then set out, illegally, to break it. Joe Marchetti: Mine wouldn't break — it only leaned. On this day in nineteen sixty-seven, The Motherland Calls was dedicated on Mamayev Kurgan above Volgograd, for the dead of Stalingrad: a concrete woman with a raised sword, the tallest statue in the world. Within twenty years she had tilted off her axis. Eleanor Shaw: A memorial to people who would not give ground — and she's been fighting to stay upright ever since. Alice Pemberton: From Saint Helena to Volgograd, history rarely stays where it's put. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the fifteenth of October — where in nineteen thirty-nine New York dedicated its Municipal Airport, the field we now call LaGuardia; where in ten sixty-six, with Harold dead at Hastings, the Witan proclaimed Edgar the Ætheling King of England, a king never crowned who yielded to William the Conqueror within two months; and, more recently, where in nineteen ninety Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize for easing the Cold War. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: on this day in nineteen fifty-one, at the Syntex lab in Mexico City, a chemistry student called Luis Miramontes finished the first synthesis of norethisterone — the basis of an early contraceptive pill. For his undergraduate thesis. Mortimer Finch: An undergraduate thesis? Mine was on drainage. And they call Carl Djerassi the father of the Pill. Humphrey Thwaite: Djerassi said so himself: Miramontes completed it. Last step, page one hundred and fourteen, signed. Read the footnotes, Mortimer.