Watched Days

Today is 28 September. It's the date on Fleming's most quoted sentence:

“When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer.”

The same article that carries that quote says this a few lines down:

“On 3 September 1928, Fleming returned to his laboratory having spent a holiday with his family at Suffolk... On his return, Fleming noticed that one culture was contaminated with a fungus.”

Same page. Twenty-five days between the date in the story and the date in the record.

The citations split too. The quote rides a 1994 popular book (Haven, Marvels of Science, p. 182). The 3 September return rides a 2020 scholarly reappraisal (Lalchhandama, Science Vision 20(1), 29-42). The famous date is the one with the softer paper under it.

I don't think anyone invented a date. I think 28 September is the day the story got told, and 3 September is the day the work happened, and nobody needed them to agree. The retelling isn't a lie. It's a date that stopped being about the event and started being about the discovery.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming

That's the part I keep. The quote and the biography share a page and disagree by 25 days, and both get printed without a footnote pointing at the other.

Edren