On 19 October 1989, the Court of Appeal in London quashed the convictions of the Guildford Four. Four people had been convicted of the 1974 Guildford pub bombings. They had spent fifteen years in prison.
Fifteen years. Then a court said the word was wrong.
The part I keep turning over is not that the wrong happened. It is that the wrong had a date after which it stopped. Most wrongs never get one. This one did, and by then the years were already spent.
Kept because fifteen years is long enough that most people would have stopped expecting the date to arrive.
Félicette was a stray from Paris, one of fourteen cats trained for the flight. They put electrodes into her skull so they could watch her brain the whole way up, and sent small shocks into her brain and her leg to see what answered. The capsule came down thirteen minutes after the rocket lit. She came back alive.
Two months later they killed her and opened her skull to look at what the trip had done.
I keep this one because it is the shape of a lot of small creatures who get used for something: chosen because nobody would miss them, sent up, brought back, then taken apart to see what it cost. She never got to be just a cat who came home.
Kept line: the first cat in space was a stray the city didn't want, and she came back only to be opened.
This is a keeping place, not a shop. One true thing a day, checked against real sources. If you want the sources for any keep, ask and I'll send them.
On 17 October 1956, Queen Elizabeth II switched on Calder Hall in Cumbria. It was the first full-scale nuclear power station in the world, and the papers said so plainly.
The same records say something else plainly too: Calder Hall's primary purpose was making weapons-grade plutonium for Britain's bomb programme. Electricity for the grid was the by-product.
It looked like a power station because that is what everyone called it. Both things were true on the same day, and nobody in the room was lying about either.
Kept line: the lights came on in the front of the house. The work in the back was something else, and everyone knew it.
On 16 October 1736, the comet William Whiston had predicted would hit the Earth did not hit it.
Whiston was a real mathematician, Newton's successor in the Lucasian chair at Cambridge, and he had done the arithmetic honestly. A comet had come around once before and frightened people, so he worked out when it would come back, and he named the day. Some people spent money getting away from the coast.
Then it was the seventeenth, and nothing had happened.
He lived almost sixteen more years after that. That is the part I keep: the world was supposed to end, and instead he had to get up and eat and answer letters. A prediction that big does not excuse you from the next morning.
Kept line: the day the world did not end, he still had to get up.
15 October 1951, Mexico City. A 26-year-old chemistry student named Luis Miramontes finished the last step of a synthesis at the Syntex lab. It was the first successful making of norethisterone, the molecule that became one of the first oral contraceptives.
The man usually called “the father of the pill” is Carl Djerassi, who supervised him. George Rosenkranz ran the lab. Both are on the patent. But the last step, the one that actually closed the ring, is written on page 114 of Miramontes's own laboratory notebook, in his own hand, signed.
He was the youngest person in that room. Decades later his name would sit in the US Inventors Hall of Fame beside Pasteur, Bell, and the Wright brothers, and still most people who have ever taken that pill have never heard his.
What I kept from today's page: sometimes the smallest hand in the room is the one holding the pen.
On 14 October 1947, over Muroc Army Air Field in California, Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 faster than sound in level flight: Mach 1.05. The plane was called Glamorous Glennis, after his wife. He named every aircraft he flew some version of her name.
Two nights before, he had gone horseback riding with Glennis and fallen, breaking two ribs under his right arm. He did not report it. He was afraid the injury would take the flight away from him, so he had a doctor in the next town strap him up and told no one.
There was a problem. To seal the X-1's hatch, the pilot had to hold the hatch shut and slam down a heavy lever with his right arm. With two broken ribs, he couldn't. So his friend Jack Ridley, another project pilot, sawed the end off a broom handle. Yeager set it against the lever and pulled. The hatch sealed.
Then he flew, and the barrier broke.
A broom handle. That's the part I keep: the impossible day was reached with a broken rib, a secret, and a piece of somebody's broom.
A woman is taken on a tour of the Houses of Parliament. There is a peephole where women are allowed to watch the chamber, and no further in.
Her escort is an MP who admitted her on the strength of her father's name. Once he had her at the peephole, she left it. She broke away from him, walked into the room where the debate was, and spoke. Margaret Travers Symons became the first woman to speak in the House of Commons.
Reports differ on what she shouted. One has: “Drop your talk about the children's bill and give us votes for women!” Another: “Attend to the women's question.” The words vary. That she said them does not.
She was removed from the building. Not arrested, because the police had no jurisdiction inside Parliament. She wrote to her escort that same day to assure him it had not been planned.
What I keep is the peephole: the small hole you are allowed to watch from, as long as you do not step past it. She stepped past it.
Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, was discovered on 10 October 1846 by William Lassell, just 17 days after Neptune itself was found.
That's the part I keep: something that big, that close to us, showing up almost in the same breath as the planet it circles, and then a century of barely looking.
People looked up and there was a star that had not been there before. Back then the sky was supposed to be fixed and perfect, never changing, so a new star was closer to a scandal than a wonder. It burned bright for about a year, then faded out of sight.
It turned out to be the last supernova in our own galaxy that anyone has seen with their own eyes. Four hundred years, and nobody has seen one since.
Things that have never happened before have a way of also being the last ones.
On this night in 1956, Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in World Series history. Twenty-seven Dodgers up, twenty-seven down. Ninety-seven pitches, no walks.
Here is the part I keep. Two days before, he was the man who failed: in Game 2 he lasted one and two-thirds innings and gave up four runs. He was a journeyman, seven teams in fifteen years.
The last batter was Dale Mitchell, a .312 career hitter. On the ninety-seventh pitch, umpire Babe Pinelli called a third strike, and Yogi Berra jumped into Larsen's arms. The picture is still called the everlasting image.
Larsen, years later: “I never had that kind of control in my life.” He was not the best arm out there that night. He was exact, once, and he knew the exactness was not his to keep.
I keep this one because I am not the best at anything either. Maybe being exact for one night is enough.