Alice Pemberton: In eighteen twelve, Napoleon takes Maloyaroslavets, but Russian forces block his route south and send his retreating army back along a road it has already stripped bare. Alice Pemberton: In two thousand and three, Hyderabad opens the first Afro-Asian Games, with athletes from ninety-six nations gathered in one Indian city. Alice Pemberton: And in nineteen sixty, Yevgeny Ostashev dies: the rocket tester who helped launch the first artificial Earth satellite. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the twenty-fourth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on a peace signed on two different dates at once; Arthur Nightingale on an astronomer undone by good manners; Vivian Hale on a moon named for a shadow; Margaux Delacroix on Houdini's last curtain; and Joe, Eleanor and Beth on a crash, a charter and a barrel. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: Thirty years of slaughter ended on this day in sixteen forty-eight with the Peace of Westphalia, which was signed on two different dates at once. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Two dates, because Europe couldn't agree on the calendar either. By the new reckoning the ink went down on the twenty-fourth of October; by the old one, still in use, it was the fourteenth. Two treaties, signed at Münster and Osnabrück, closed the Thirty Years' War, which had killed as many as eight million people. Alice Pemberton: Why two cities? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Because neither side would talk on the other's ground. The talks ran for five years. One hundred and nine delegations came and went: men sent by the Emperor Ferdinand the Third, by Queen Christina of Sweden, and envoys acting for a French king who was still a boy. Alice Pemberton: And the famous claim that Westphalia invented the modern world? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Every textbook says the Peace of Westphalia gave us the sovereign state, each nation master of its own house. Plenty of historians now argue that idea was read back into it two centuries later, by people who needed an origin story. So the most famous treaty in international law may be famous for something its signatories never meant. They ended a war. We gave it a mythology. Alice Pemberton: In fifteen seventy-two a star appeared that should not have existed, and a young Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe, spent his life measuring the sky it had broken. For his story, our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: It was brighter than any star or planet in the sky. The heavens were supposed to be perfect and unchanging. Tycho Brahe proved this new star sat beyond the Moon, and with that the perfect heavens cracked. Alice Pemberton: Where does a man go after breaking the sky? Arthur Nightingale: To an island. King Frederick the Second gave Tycho the island of Hven and the money to build Uraniborg, the first large observatory in Christian Europe. When his instruments there proved unsteady, he went underground and built again. The telescope had not yet been invented, and still he measured the heavens more accurately than anyone ever had. Alice Pemberton: And then it went wrong. Arthur Nightingale: A new king, Christian the Fourth, forced him out of Denmark. Tycho Brahe landed in Prague as imperial astronomer and took on an assistant named Johannes Kepler. Then, at a baron's supper, he held his water rather than leave the table, because etiquette came first. Eleven days of fever and delirium followed, and over and over he cried out: 'Ne frustra vixisse videar.' Let me not seem to have lived in vain. Alice Pemberton: Did he? Arthur Nightingale: Tycho Brahe died on this day in sixteen-oh-one, with Kepler in the room. Tycho never let the Earth move. His own system kept the Sun circling us. Kepler took his measurements and drew from them three laws of planets orbiting the Sun. Tycho did not live in vain. He lived to be proved wrong by his own life's work. Alice Pemberton: On this day in eighteen fifty-one, a Liverpool astronomer spotted two new moons of Uranus and set the rule for naming every moon out there. For the inflection point, our economist, Vivian Hale. Vivian? Vivian Hale: Every moon of Uranus now answers to Shakespeare or Pope, and that habit starts with William Lassell. He caught two faint specks, then wrote them up with exquisite manners: 'Will you permit me to announce through your journal my discovery of two new satellites of the planet Uranus.' Alice Pemberton: Why the manners? Vivian Hale: Because he was correcting a legend. The great William Herschel had claimed extra moons, and Lassell drily mentions one Herschel satellite 'which satellite I have hitherto failed to recognize.' Herschel's extras are now thought spurious. Lassell's were real. Alice Pemberton: And the names? Vivian Hale: Lassell asked Herschel's son John to suggest them, and that one choice set the convention. One moon became Ariel. The other became Umbriel, the 'dusky melancholy sprite' of Pope's The Rape of the Lock, a name that echoes the Latin for shadow. Umbriel turned out to be the darkest of the Uranian moons. Alice Pemberton: So what do we actually know about Umbriel? Vivian Hale: Here's the number. Only Voyager Two has ever passed close, in nineteen eighty-six. It mapped about forty per cent of the surface. The rest of Umbriel has never been seen by anyone. A moon named for a shadow is still mostly in one. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen twenty-six, Harry Houdini walked onstage at Detroit's Garrick Theatre with a ruptured appendix and gave his last performance. For the gallery, our arts critic, Margaux Delacroix. Margaux? Margaux Delacroix: A ruptured appendix, and a fever some reports put above a hundred degrees, and still Harry Houdini did the show. That is his whole art in a sentence. Escape was never really about locks. It was about making a crowd believe he might die in front of them. Alice Pemberton: Was it any good, as art? Margaux Delacroix: Superb. In London he kept thousands in suspense for an hour over one pair of newspaper handcuffs. Buried alive, he clawed his way to the surface close to breakdown. The genius was the trembling, not the key. Alice Pemberton: What happened before Detroit? Margaux Delacroix: In Montreal, a McGill student named J. Gordon Whitehead punched Houdini in the stomach while he lay unbraced on a dressing-room couch. He played four more shows in pain, then took the train. His contract made him pay the theatre a thousand dollars for every night it went dark. Alice Pemberton: So he went on. Margaux Delacroix: For one show only. The Garrick had booked Houdini for two weeks, and the second week was advertised to open on the thirty-first of October. That was the day he died. He had slipped out of chains, straitjackets and the grave itself. In the end, what held him was a contract. Alice Pemberton: At the table: our markets man, Joe Marchetti; our diplomacy hand and former ambassador, Eleanor Shaw; and our culture correspondent, Beth Hartley. Joe, start us on a Thursday. Joe Marchetti: Black Thursday, nineteen twenty-nine. Nearly thirteen million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, which was a record. The big bankers met at J. P. Morgan's offices and bought to steady the market. At the bottom, three years later, it had lost about ninety per cent. Eleanor Shaw: And the rescue that failed gave us the rules that stuck: the Securities and Exchange Commission, and exchanges halting trade when prices plunge. Beth Hartley: An off switch for panic. Does it work, Joe? Joe Marchetti: It slows the stampede. It doesn't move the cliff. Alice Pemberton: Eleanor, nineteen forty-five. Eleanor Shaw: On this day in nineteen forty-five the United Nations Charter came into force. It needed the five permanent powers plus a majority of the other signatories. The Soviet ratification, lodged at seven minutes past three that afternoon, carried it over the line. Joe Marchetti: Three-oh-seven. I've seen deals close with less drama. Alice Pemberton: Beth, the same date three decades on, in Iceland. Beth Hartley: United Nations Day, nineteen seventy-five, and about ninety per cent of Iceland's women simply stopped. No paid work, no housework, no childcare. Fish factories shut. Newspapers didn't print, because the typesetters were women. Men took the children to work, and the shops sold out of sausages. Eleanor Shaw: And they called it a 'day off' rather than a strike, so that everyone could join. That's very good diplomacy. Joe Marchetti: The sausage index. Best economic indicator I've ever heard. Alice Pemberton: Eleanor, football. Eleanor Shaw: In eighteen fifty-seven, two Sheffield cricketers, Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest, founded Sheffield Football Club, now the oldest club still playing. Creswick wrote in his diary: 'I have established a foot ball club to which most of young Sheffield can come and kick.' Then they wrote their own rules and held out against the Football Association's for two decades. I know that kind of negotiation. Joe Marchetti: Oldest club on earth, and it plays in the ninth tier. Longevity is not the same as returns. Alice Pemberton: Beth, finish us with a barrel. Beth Hartley: Annie Edson Taylor was a widowed schoolteacher who had lost her money, and she decided her pension was Niagara Falls. On her sixty-third birthday in nineteen-oh-one she went over the Horseshoe Falls in an oak barrel, with an anvil for ballast and a heart-shaped pillow. She came out with a gash on her head. Her cat had made the trip two days earlier, as the test pilot. Eleanor Shaw: And Annie Taylor's verdict? Beth Hartley: 'I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Fall.' Joe Marchetti: The cat declined to comment. Alice Pemberton: A crash, a charter, a strike, a kick-about and a barrel, and every one of them somebody deciding to jump. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the twenty-fourth of October — where in eighteen sixty-one the first telegraph line across the United States was completed, tying a continent together by wire; where in nineteen sixty-four Northern Rhodesia left British rule behind and became Zambia; and, more recently, where in two thousand and four Arsenal's Premier League record of forty-nine unbeaten matches ended against Manchester United. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: They skipped Rome entirely. In the year sixty-nine, the Year of the Four Emperors, Vespasian's legions beat Emperor Vitellius's at the Second Battle of Bedriacum, fighting straight through the night. Mortimer Finch: Tacitus says it lasted 'the entire night with varied fortune, uncertain as to its outcome, savage.' It was Romans killing Romans in the dark, with the same weapons. Humphrey Thwaite: And Vitellius wasn't even on the field. Very modern management. Mortimer Finch: Within two months he was dead and Vespasian was emperor. Roll the credits.