Alice Pemberton: In nineteen forty-five, a coup in Venezuela topples President Isaías Medina Angarita and opens the way to the country's first election by universal suffrage. Alice Pemberton: In fifteen forty, the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto's forces destroy the fortified town of Mabila, in what is now Alabama, killing Tuskaloosa. Alice Pemberton: And in eighteen seventy-three, Renton beat Kilmarnock in the very first match of the Scottish Cup. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the eighteenth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on the physicist who called his own betrayal the worst thing he ever did; Arthur Nightingale on a computer that waited more than a century to be built; Rufus McCrae on a wedding the calendar can't agree on; Judge Marion Calloway on a poet's freedom in one legal sentence; and Bradford Winslow, Eleanor Shaw and Hugo Carr on a jump no machine could measure. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: The man who sent it had helped build it. By this day in nineteen forty-five, Moscow's atomic programme held the plans for America's plutonium bomb. For the front page, our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Professor Edmund Cavendish: Helped build it from the inside. Klaus Fuchs was a German-born British physicist who came to Los Alamos with the British mission and worked under Hans Bethe on implosion — the design a plutonium bomb depends on. He passed it on in instalments: the principle, the critical mass, then a sketch with every component and its dimensions. The courier was Harry Gold. In Soviet cable traffic, Gold was 'Goose' and Fuchs was 'Rest'. Alice Pemberton: Did Klaus Fuchs ever reckon with what he'd done? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Five years later he confessed to an MI5 officer, William Skardon, and signed this: 'in particular at Los Alamos I did what I consider to be the worst I have done, namely to give information about the principle of the design of the plutonium bomb.' Alice Pemberton: And how early did it start? Professor Edmund Cavendish: The first instalment went in February, months before the bomb had ever been tested. Los Alamos fenced off a desert to keep its secret, and the secret walked out in one man's head. The bomb never belonged to one country — not even on the morning it was first lit. Alice Pemberton: He designed a programmable computer, and died on this day in eighteen seventy-one without finishing a single one. For the biographical sketch, our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur Nightingale: Without finishing a single one — and Charles Babbage knew it. He died at his home on Dorset Street in London, at seventy-nine. Even his obituary in The Times got his birth wrong by a year, until a nephew wrote in to correct it. He'd begun as a sickly boy: a fever sent him to a country school to recover, and a school library in Enfield made him a mathematician. Alice Pemberton: So where does the machine begin? Arthur Nightingale: With a letter to Sir Humphry Davy, proposing an engine that would calculate. The government paid Babbage to build it — the Difference Engine — and after ten years of work, the building stopped. Alice Pemberton: And he walked away? Arthur Nightingale: He walked further in. Babbage drew the Analytical Engine, programmed on a principle he openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom, with printers designed to go with it — the essential ideas of a modern computer, on paper. His Saturday soirées were among the best-attended in London. The salons filled; the workshop never did. Arthur Nightingale: Charles Babbage refined those drawings for the rest of his life, and died with them. Then, in nineteen ninety-one, the Science Museum in London built his Difference Engine from his original plans, to tolerances his own century could have managed. It worked. He was never wrong. He simply ran out of time. Alice Pemberton: Juan Perón married Eva Duarte in nineteen forty-five, and the paperwork is better than the legend. For a Quick Fire, our resident sceptic and man of letters, Rufus McCrae. Rufus McCrae: Better than the legend, and fussier. The almanacs put the Perón wedding on this day; the civil register in Junín says the twenty-second of October. Trust the clerk, never the calendar. Alice Pemberton: What did the clerk write down? Rufus McCrae: Juan Domingo Perón, fifty, bachelor. María Eva Duarte, twenty-three, profession: 'artista'. Witness: a lieutenant colonel. Romance, with a regimental stamp on it. Alice Pemberton: And the proposal? Rufus McCrae: Made from prison, as Argentine reporters tell it — Perón to Evita: 'Nos casamos y nos vamos a vivir a cualquier parte.' We marry, and we go and live anywhere at all. Alice Pemberton: Anywhere? Rufus McCrae: Anywhere turned out to be the presidency. And the church wedding in La Plata that December earned its own headline: the day Perón stood Evita up at the altar, and how they talked him into a church at all. The great love story of Argentine politics: she said yes to anywhere, and he had to be persuaded to the altar. Alice Pemberton: On this day in seventeen seventy-three, a young poet in Boston sat down to tell a friend she was free. Phillis Wheatley, for the Bookshelf — with our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Judge Marion Calloway: Free — and she wanted it in writing. Phillis Wheatley had just sailed home from London, and a Boston paper greeted her as 'Phillis the extraordinary Negro poetess servant to Mr. John Wheatley.' Servant. Within weeks, John Wheatley signed her manumission. Alice Pemberton: Why then? Judge Marion Calloway: Pressure from her friends in England, among them Granville Sharp, whose name was tied to the Somerset ruling the year before, against forcing enslaved people out of England. And her mistress, Susanna Wheatley, was dying. Alice Pemberton: What did Phillis Wheatley actually write? Judge Marion Calloway: To David Wooster: 'Since my return to America my Master, has at the desire of my friends in England given me my freedom. The instrument is drawn so as to secure me and my property from the hands of Executus, administrators, and of my master, and secure whatever should be given me as my Own.' Executors, administrators, her own master — she lists every hand that might reach back for her. And on the page, in a sentence of borrowed legal language, one word wears a capital letter. Own. Alice Pemberton: Around the table: our old newspaperman, Bradford Winslow; our diplomacy hand, the former ambassador Eleanor Shaw; and our narrative historian, Hugo Carr. Eleanor — a flag over San Juan. Eleanor Shaw: On this day in eighteen ninety-eight, the American flag went up over San Juan, and Puerto Rico passed from Spain to the United States. General Nelson Miles had told the island his army came 'bearing the banner of freedom.' Its people are American citizens who still cannot vote in a federal election. Hugo Carr: Every conqueror I've written about carried that banner, Eleanor. It's always lighter going in. Bradford Winslow: Mine's a mangling of a different kind. On this day in eighteen fifty-one, Richard Bentley of London published Moby-Dick — under the title The Whale. His printer cut it in over two hundred places and dropped the Epilogue entirely. Eleanor Shaw: And the cover? Bradford Winslow: Sea-blue cloth, gilt whales diving down the spine. Right whales — not sperm whales. Wrong whale, Eleanor. Hugo Carr: At least Melville got a cover. Pappus of Alexandria, one of the last great Greek mathematicians, left us almost no life at all — except an eclipse he calculated, in the Egyptian month of Tybi. It fell on this day in three hundred and twenty, and it's the only fixed date we have for the man. Bradford Winslow: Dated by the sky. Finest byline I ever heard. Hugo Carr: Then one the instruments couldn't reach. At the Mexico City Olympics in nineteen sixty-eight, Bob Beamon long-jumped so far the optical measuring device fell short, and officials sent for a steel tape. When Ralph Boston told him it was over twenty-nine feet, Beamon sank to his knees. Igor Ter-Ovanesyan said it for everyone: 'After that jump, the rest of us are children.' Eleanor Shaw: And Beamon's record stood twenty-three years. In my trade, that's a durable settlement. Bradford Winslow: Last word to the wireless. On this day in nineteen twenty-two, the British Broadcasting Company was formed, in one room and a small antechamber at Magnet House in London. Its first daily programme, a month later, was the news — followed by the weather. Hugo Carr: Still the correct order. Alice Pemberton: A flag, a wrong whale, an eclipse and a tape measure — history keeps its best things in the margins. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the eighteenth of October — where in nineteen twenty-nine the Privy Council in London overruled Canada's own Supreme Court and declared women 'Persons' under Canadian law; where in seventeen forty-eight the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was signed and the War of the Austrian Succession was finally over; and where in eleven sixty-six Michael the Syrian, one of the most important historians ever to write in Syriac, was consecrated patriarch. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: in ten-oh-nine, the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim had the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem torn down to the bedrock. Mortimer Finch: Thorough fellow. Humphrey Thwaite: Not thorough enough. The iron hammers did nothing to the rock, so the workmen resorted to fire. Mortimer Finch: And yet the church is still standing. Humphrey Thwaite: Because his own son let Emperor Constantine the Ninth rebuild it. Fathers, Mortimer. Mortimer Finch: Sons, Humphrey. It's always the sons.