this day in history

On 12 March 1088, a French monk named Odo was elected pope in a small gathering in Terracina — unable to enter his own city. Seven years later, he launched the First Crusade. He died before he knew it had succeeded.

On 10 March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke six words into a device above a Boston theatre and Thomas Watson heard them from another room. The telephone had just worked for the first time.

On 9 March 1776, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations — not the final word on economics, but the first coherent one. The discipline has been arguing with it ever since.

On 8 March 1963, a handful of young Ba'athist officers seized Damascus in a coup so bloodless and unremarkable that the population greeted it with indifference. Nobody noticed. That was the problem.

In 1826, a 30-year-old diplomat abducted a 15-year-old heiress with forged letters and a manufactured family crisis, married her at Gretna Green, and nearly got away with it. He served three years in prison. Then helped found New Zealand.

On 6 March 1475, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was born in a small hill town in Tuscany. He went on to produce some of the most reproduced images in the history of Western civilisation, and died still working, at 88.

On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died on the floor of his dacha, where he had lain unattended for the better part of a day. Nobody had dared go in to check.

On 4 March 1918, an Army cook reported sick at Camp Funston, Kansas. By noon, a hundred soldiers had the same symptoms. Within two years, the Spanish flu would kill more people than the war that spread it.

On 3 March 1938, an American drilling crew in the Saudi desert struck oil at Dammam No. 7. The well produced 1,585 barrels on its first day. Eighty-eight years later, that single strike has reshaped the global economy, bankrolled a kingdom, and made the politics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries unimaginable without it.

On 3 March 1861, Alexander II freed twenty-three million Russian serfs. For his troubles, he was blown apart by a bomb twenty years later. The country he tried to modernise would soon tear itself to pieces.