Alice Pemberton: In nineteen ninety-eight, Eric Rudolph is charged with bombing a Birmingham abortion clinic, killing a police officer. Alice Pemberton: In twenty twenty-three, Australians reject the Indigenous Voice referendum, denying Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples a proposed constitutional advisory body. Alice Pemberton: In nineteen fifty-seven, the Queen of Canada opens a Canadian Parliament in person, the only time it ever happens. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the fourteenth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on six minutes over Cuba; Arthur Nightingale on the only woman to rule Delhi as Sultan; Judge Marion Calloway, Doc Sullivan and Rufus McCrae on a punishment that backfired; Vivian Hale on a needle that tipped off the scale; and Hugo Carr, Margaux Delacroix and Bradford Winslow at the table. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen sixty-two, an American pilot spent six minutes over western Cuba and brought home the Cuban Missile Crisis. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Six minutes, at about seventy-two thousand feet. Major Richard Heyser flew his U-2 spy plane south to north across western Cuba with the cameras running. He brought back nine hundred and twenty-eight frames. One of them, held in the National Archives, is catalogued as Launch Site Number One, San Cristóbal. Alice Pemberton: What did the analysts find? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Three sites near San Cristóbal, with transporters and erector launchers in tentative firing positions. Moscow had agreed with Fidel Castro that summer to put nuclear missiles on the island, to deter another American invasion. And Washington already had its own Jupiter missiles in Turkey, within range of Moscow. Alice Pemberton: So how close did it come? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Kennedy's advisers urged an air strike, then an invasion. He chose a naval blockade instead, and called it a 'quarantine', to avoid the formal implications of a state of war. That word bought thirteen days to bargain. The Soviet missiles came out; the American missiles quietly left Turkey. Heyser's film handed Kennedy the case for war. One softer word handed him the way out. Alice Pemberton: Her coins named her Sultan — never Sultana, which means a king's wife. For the Biographical Sketch, our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale, on Razia Sultan of Delhi. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: A king's wife was never the plan. Razia Sultan was the eldest daughter of Iltutmish, Sultan of Delhi. When he rode out to campaign at Gwalior, he left her running the capital. Alice Pemberton: And she ran it well? Arthur Nightingale: Well enough that he came home and ordered a decree naming her his heir. His nobles objected; he had living sons. Iltutmish told them Razia was more capable than his sons. But when he died, the nobles crowned her half-brother Ruknuddin, and his mother, Shah Turkan, planned to have Razia executed. Alice Pemberton: How does a condemned daughter take a throne? Arthur Nightingale: She goes to the people. Razia turned the public of Delhi against Shah Turkan, and when Ruknuddin was deposed in twelve thirty-six, she took the throne herself. The Turkic nobles who backed her expected a figurehead. Instead Razia Sultan ruled, and promoted outsiders — above all her Abyssinian loyalist, Jamal al-Din Yaqut. Arthur Nightingale: Within four years her own army mutinied, killed Yaqut and imprisoned her. Her captor, the rebel Altunia, married her, and prisoner and captor marched on Delhi together against her half-brother Bahram. The one near-contemporary chronicler, Minhaj, records the end: 'Sultan Raziya and Malik Altuniya were defeated. When in their flight they reached Kaithal, their remaining forces abandoned them, and they both fell into the hands of the Hindus and were killed.' Arthur Nightingale: That was October, twelve-forty. Razia Sultan was the first Muslim woman to rule in the subcontinent, and the only one Delhi ever had. They took her throne and her life. Not the title. Even the line that records her death begins 'Sultan Raziya.' Alice Pemberton: On this day in seventeen seventy-four, delegates in Philadelphia denounced Parliament's Intolerable Acts. The Long Echo, with our jurist Judge Marion Calloway, our science man Doc Sullivan, and our sceptic Rufus McCrae. Judge? Judge Marion Calloway: Denounced them as loyal subjects, Alice, not as rebels. Parliament had passed the Intolerable Acts after the Boston Tea Party, to end self-government in Massachusetts. The First Continental Congress, sitting in Carpenters' Hall, answered with the old legal argument: the rights of Englishmen, and no taxation without representation. Then it demanded concessions. Doc Sullivan: What spread out of Carpenters' Hall behaved like an outbreak. The Congress began coordinating resistance through underground committees built on the Sons of Liberty network, colony to colony, carrier to carrier. Within months the British tried to disarm the colonists, and you get Lexington and Concord. Alice Pemberton: Though one colony never came. Rufus McCrae: Georgia. Fighting a frontier war with the Creek, Georgia didn't dare lose British military protection, so its chair stayed empty. Which tells you what the textbooks smooth over: nobody in that room was asking for independence. Alice Pemberton: So what turned it? Rufus McCrae: London did. The Intolerable Acts were written to break one colony, and instead they introduced twelve of them to each other. Parliament didn't lose America at Yorktown. It lost it in a punishment. Alice Pemberton: A punishment that built a Congress. Judge, Doc, Rufus — thank you. Alice Pemberton: On this day in nineteen forty-seven, a rocket plane fell out of a bomber's belly over the Mojave Desert, with Chuck Yeager inside. For the Inflection Point, our economist, Vivian Hale. Vivian? Vivian Hale: Out of the bomb bay of a B-29, at about twenty thousand feet. Captain Chuck Yeager was flying the Bell X-1, nicknamed Glamorous Glennis, and the open question at Muroc was whether the sound barrier was really a barrier. Alice Pemberton: Where's the decision? Vivian Hale: Levelling off, Yeager found he had fuel to spare. His own report: 'I had thirty percent of my fuel, so I turned on rocket chamber three.' One switch. Then, in his words: 'Suddenly the Mach needle began to fluctuate. It went up to point nine six five Mach — then tipped right off the scale.' Alice Pemberton: Off the scale meaning what? Vivian Hale: Mach one point oh six — about seven hundred miles an hour, the first confirmed flight faster than sound in level flight. The rockets burned for roughly twenty seconds; the cascade ran for decades. By nineteen sixty-two Yeager was the first commandant of the school that trained astronauts for NASA. Vivian Hale: And the wall everyone feared? Yeager's report has the last word: 'the faster I got, the smoother the ride.' Alice Pemberton: Five more echoes from the fourteenth of October, and three guests: our narrative historian Hugo Carr, our arts and culture critic Margaux Delacroix, and our old newspaperman Bradford Winslow. Margaux, first. Margaux Delacroix: A patent, Alice. In eighteen eighty-four George Eastman, a former bank clerk from Rochester, was granted one for photographic film on a strip of paper. No more changing glass plates between shots. Photography stops being a ceremony and starts being a habit. Bradford Winslow: And habits sell. Four years later he built the Kodak camera around the roll. Mine's Dublin, eighteen forty-three. Daniel O'Connell, the Liberator, leader of Catholic Ireland, is arrested for conspiracy over his campaign to restore an Irish Parliament. He gives bail at his own house in Merrion Square and writes to the country that same day: 'Be tranquil, then, and we shall be triumphant.' Hugo Carr: Calm as a weapon. He never got his Irish Parliament, but he never got his riot either. Mine went the other way. In nineteen thirty-three Germany walked out of the League of Nations, and Hitler put it to a plebiscite: 'Does the nation agree with this policy of its government?' Margaux Delacroix: A question with exactly one permitted answer. Hugo Carr: And the League had no answer at all. Within six years, Europe was at war. Bradford Winslow: Here's a man who walked out properly. In nineteen fifty-six B. R. Ambedkar, born into a caste treated as untouchable, the man who chaired the committee that drafted India's constitution, converted to Buddhism at Nagpur. In white silk, he touched his forehead three times at the foot of a Buddha statue, then turned and gave the same vows to the crowd, in Marathi. Margaux Delacroix: He didn't just leave a faith. He opened a door and held it — the Dalit Buddhist movement starts on that stage. Hugo Carr: Something lighter. In nineteen sixty-eight at the Mexico City Olympics, Jim Hines won the hundred metres and the scoreboard flashed nine point eight nine. Then the official photo-finish came off Polaroid film a couple of minutes later: nine point nine five, the first time under ten seconds on an electronic clock. Margaux Delacroix: So in the end, film still had the final word over the light beam. Alice Pemberton: A patent, a bail bond, a plebiscite, a vow and a photo-finish. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the fourteenth of October — where in nineteen forty-three the prisoners of the Sobibor extermination camp rose up, killed eleven SS officers and broke out in a mass escape; where in nineteen-oh-eight the Chicago Cubs won the World Series and then waited more than a century for another; and, more recently, where in twenty eleven Michael Woodford was sacked as chief executive of Olympus for uncovering the misconduct behind one of the largest scandals in Japanese business history. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: They skipped Boston, sixteen fifty-six. On this day the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed its first law against the Quakers: 'a cursed sect of heretics, lately risen up in the world.' Mortimer Finch: That's not a law, Humphrey, that's a review. Humphrey Thwaite: A review with a fine. Any ship's master who landed a Quaker paid one hundred pounds, and the Quaker was severely whipped on arrival. Mortimer Finch: Freedom of religion, then. Terms and conditions apply.