1645
Battle of Naseby
Parliament's New Model Army, the first fully professional English force, crushed Charles I at Naseby in Northamptonshire. Captured royal correspondence revealed the king's secret negotiations with Irish Catholics and foreign powers, destroying what remained of his reputation. The first civil war was essentially over, and the road from battlefield to scaffold now stretched before the defeated king.
Dorgon Issues Queue Order
The Manchu regent ordered all Chinese men to shave their foreheads and braid their hair into the distinctive queue of Qing subjects, on pain of death. Keep your hair and lose your head, or lose your hair and keep your head, went the saying. Millions chose the latter; many chose the former.
Venetians Besiege Ottoman Crete
Ottoman forces landed on Crete and began a siege of the Venetian fortress of Candia that would drag on for twenty-one years, the longest siege in history. Venetian galleys blockaded, Turkish sappers tunneled, and the garrison slowly starved behind walls that crumbled and were rebuilt in an agonizing loop of endurance.
Torricelli Invents the Barometer
Evangelista Torricelli, a student of Galileo, sealed mercury in a glass tube and inverted it into a dish, watching the silver column drop to a fixed height and leave a vacuum above. He had built the first barometer and proven that air had weight. The atmosphere, invisible and omnipresent, had finally been measured.
Pascal Invents the Mechanical Calculator
The nineteen-year-old Blaise Pascal, tired of helping his tax collector father add columns, designed a brass machine with interlocking gears that could perform addition and subtraction. The Pascaline was temperamental and expensive but it worked. Mechanical computation had its first commercially offered device, and the dream of automating arithmetic that would eventually produce the computer had taken its first tangible form.