1650
Population of Americas Collapses
A century and a half after contact, the indigenous population of the Americas had fallen by roughly ninety percent, from perhaps sixty million to under six million, mostly through epidemic disease. So much farmland reverted to forest that some scientists would later argue the regrowth cooled the global climate, linking colonial genocide to a measurable shift in the planet's atmosphere.
Descartes Dies in Stockholm
The French philosopher, summoned by Queen Christina of Sweden to give her early-morning lessons in the royal library, caught pneumonia in the Baltic cold and died at fifty-three. He had always insisted on a warm bed until noon. The father of modern philosophy had been killed, in effect, by an ambitious queen.
Kangxi Emperor Born
The third Qing emperor, Xuanye, was born in the Forbidden City to a concubine of the Shunzhi Emperor. He would ascend the throne at seven, consolidate Qing rule, defeat the Three Feudatories, annex Taiwan, and reign for sixty-one years as one of the most effective monarchs in Chinese history, presiding over an era of stability and cultural flourishing.
Otto von Guericke Demonstrates the Vacuum
The mayor of Magdeburg and amateur natural philosopher Otto von Guericke built an air pump, evacuated two copper hemispheres, and showed that sixteen horses could not pull them apart. The demonstration, later staged for the emperor, proved that atmospheric pressure was real and vacuum was possible. Nature no longer, clearly, abhorred it.