What happened on September 28
All 5 specimens from this file, spanning 1066 to 1953, with the story behind each photograph.
Reveal the full answer key
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An invasion fleet lands unopposed on the English coast
William of Normandy landed at Pevensey on 28 September 1066 with several hundred ships and found nobody waiting. Harold was in Yorkshire, having beaten a Norwegian invasion three days earlier, and had to march his army 250 miles south. They met at Hastings less than three weeks later.
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An allied army digs in around a port and traps an army that cannot be evacuated
French and American forces closed in on Yorktown on 28 September 1781. What made it work was at sea: a French fleet had beaten off the Royal Navy weeks earlier, so no ships could take Cornwallis off. He surrendered on 19 October, and the fighting in America was effectively over.
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A metal cylinder in a vault becomes the definition of the kilogram
The first General Conference on Weights and Measures sanctioned the international prototype metre and kilogram on 28 September 1889. The kilogram was a platinum-iridium cylinder kept under three bell jars near Paris, and for 130 years a kilogram was simply whatever that object weighed. It was finally replaced by a definition based on physical constants in 2019.
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Two aircraft land after flying all the way round the world
Four American aircraft set out in April 1924 and two got home to Seattle on 28 September, the first flight around the world: 175 days, 27,553 miles and 74 stops. They changed engines five times each along the way, and swapped between floats and wheels depending on the leg.
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The astronomer who proved the universe is expanding dies at his desk
Edwin Hubble died of a stroke on 28 September 1953. He had shown that the smudges called nebulae were other galaxies, and that the further away they are the faster they are receding, which is the observation the Big Bang theory grew out of. There is no Nobel Prize in astronomy, so he never got one.