1747
Ahmad Shah Durrani Founds Afghanistan
After Nader Shah's murder, his twenty-five-year-old Pashtun cavalry commander, Ahmad Shah Abdali, took the Koh-i-Noor and a tribal assembly at Kandahar took him as their shah. He renamed himself Durrani, the pearl of pearls, and built an empire stretching from the Amu Darya to Delhi. Modern Afghanistan dates its birth to that gathering.
Lind's Scurvy Experiment
Aboard HMS Salisbury, Scottish naval surgeon James Lind divided twelve scurvy-stricken sailors into six pairs and tried a different treatment on each: cider, vitriol, vinegar, seawater, barley water, and citrus. The citrus pair recovered in a week. The Royal Navy would take forty years to notice. Scientific clinical trials had a beginning.
Franklin's Kite Hypothesis
In Philadelphia letters to the Royal Society, Benjamin Franklin proposed that lightning was electrical and that a pointed iron rod could draw it safely from a cloud. The idea was mocked in Europe before being tested. Within five years the first lightning rods would stand on French and American rooftops. Practical electricity had been born in a postmaster's garret.
Assassination of Nader Shah
The Persian conqueror, by then paranoid, half-blind, and cruel beyond his own men's endurance, was cut down in his tent by his own guards. His empire collapsed within days. One of his Afghan commanders, Ahmad Shah Abdali, marched south and founded the Durrani dynasty, the origin of modern Afghanistan. Nader's plundered treasures, including the Koh-i-Noor diamond, scattered across a dozen successor courts.