Octavian hands power back to the Senate and people (27 BC), and Henry Ford patents plastic car construction (1942). Born on this day: Wilhelm Wien, Sydney Brenner and Eric Betzig. Died: James Joyce, Charles III and Maria Sibylla Merian.
29 events, 57 births and 56 deaths on this date.
Octavian formally gave up his extraordinary powers and returned the state to the Senate and people, yet was granted control of Spain, Gaul and Syria for ten years. The move was a carefully staged step that let him rule as the first emperor while keeping the old republican forms.
С. И. Сосновский · CC BY-SA 4.0CleopatraHear the story in ChunksFord, best known for making cars affordable through the assembly line, was granted a patent for a car built from plastic. It was an unusual push into new materials from a man whose fortune rested on mass production.
Fred Hartsook · Public domain
The English band's debut album came out in America on this day, built on heavy electric guitar and blues-rooted riffs. It helped define hard rock and became one of the most influential records of the decade.
Writing to his vice president-elect, Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson made clear he opposed South Carolina's challenge to federal authority during the Nullification Crisis. Jackson, who had long championed keeping the states united, was signalling where his government stood.
Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl · Public domain
Fighters loyal to Ali Nasir Muhammad and Abdul Fattah Ismail, two rival leaders in South Yemen, began a fierce struggle in the port that lasted about a month. Thousands were killed or wounded.
Edward Coolidge was found guilty of killing the teenager, but the verdict was later thrown out. The 1971 Supreme Court ruling in Coolidge v. New Hampshire, a landmark Fourth Amendment case on searches, overturned that verdict.
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Wilhelm Wien was a German physicist whose work on how hot bodies give off light and heat earned him the 1911 Nobel Prize in Physics. His displacement law still lets scientists predict a blackbody's glow at one temperature from its glow at another.
Public domain
South African-British biologist who helped crack the genetic code and turned the tiny roundworm C. elegans into a model organism for studying development. He shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
OIST from Onna Village, Japan · CC BY 2.0
Eric Betzig is an American physicist whose work on super-resolved fluorescence microscopy, shared with Stefan Hell and William Moerner, earned him the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He lets scientists watch living cells in far finer detail than traditional light microscopes allow.
Ecole polytechnique Université Paris-Saclay · CC BY-SA 2.0
Joyce was the Irish writer behind Ulysses, a 1922 novel that retells Homer's Odyssey through a single day in Dublin and reshaped modern fiction. He died in Zurich in 1941, leaving Finnegans Wake unfinished in its final form.
Public domain
Charles the Fat, the last Carolingian emperor to rule a united Frankish realm, died in retirement a few weeks after being deposed by his nephew Arnulf. Often judged lethargic, he had bought peace with Viking raiders, a policy that contributed to his downfall.
Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
Maria Sibylla Merian was a German-Dutch naturalist who drew insects from egg to adult, showing that they develop through stages rather than arising from mud. Her 1705 book on the insects of Dutch Guiana, which she studied in person, remains a landmark of natural illustration.
Jacob Marrel · Public domain
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