On July 20 the resin, moss and coal-dust powered Pyréolophore was patented. And we never looked back.

Perhaps you think we never looked forward either. I can’t recall the last time I selected either moss or resin at a gas station. Or even coal dust though I can at least vaguely imagine doing so in some alternative steam-punk universe. But the unpronounceably named Pryewhatever was the first internal combustion engine in actual practice, powering a boat up the Saône river in France, which is why Napoleon gave its inventor Nicéphore Niépce a patent in 1807.

Bits and pieces of the technology had been around for a very long time, from a crank and connecting rod at a sawmill in Hierapolis in Roman Asia Minor in the 3^rd century AD to, well, other cranks and rods until al-Jazari’s 12^th-century two-cylinder crankshaft pump. And then in the 17^th century Samuel Morland began experimenting with gunpowder to power a water pump which frankly makes resin sound like a good idea. At any rate, a lot fewer people have been blown to bits by resin gone bad.

Of course then you got James Watt’s steam engine and all that. But people kept thinking you could make a more effective engine using something more inherently explosive than water if you didn’t die trying. By the very late 18^th century people had internal combustion engines but without compression. By 1801 one Philippe LeBon D’Humberstein thought of compression in a two-stroke gas engine. And then in 1807 the guy with the unpronounceable name put one into a vehicle and the rest is history.

Slow-moving history, you may think. The Pyrewhoosit didn’t exactly roar up the unpronounceable river like a hovercraft. And the moss-fuel thing didn’t work out despite period bursts of fringe enthusiasm for peat. But the internal combustion engine went from strength to strength with gathering steam substitute. Indeed by coincidence it was exactly 96 years after Niepamacallit’s patent, on July 20 1903, that the Ford Motor Company shipped its first car. But not, as you’re aware, its last.

It’s odd to think of how more dramatically everyday life changed between 1807 and 2007 than it had between 1807 and 1607, to say nothing of the rate of change from 1007 to 1607, or 207 to 1007. I don’t know if people will ever find gasoline as fuel as funny as moss, resin and coal dust. But it is safe to say that given the trajectory of the internal combustion engine from what’s that noise?… and that smell?... to clunky hand-made cars to the United States being able, in Will Rogers’ apt phrase, to go to the poorhouse in an automobile by 1929, the incredible transformation of our lives from work to leisure to courting that resulted, successive technologies are likely to develop at even more unsettling speed.

We might at least look ahead and ask whether we’re hurtling up the river toward the New Jerusalem or some nasty rapids. You know. While there’s still time to switch the smelly thing off and hoist a sail or something.

So here’s another wonder of the steam age: The SS Great Britain. Now a museum, she was launched on July 19 1843, before Prince Albert could arrive to perform the ceremony. The longest passenger ship in the world in the mid-19^th century (1845-54) and, crucially, the first ever large ocean-going ship to combine the cutting-edge technologies of an iron hull and a screw propeller. How the world has shrunk in the modern era.

No really. Designed by, of course, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, for the Bristol-New York “run,” as it would become under such circumstances, she was the first iron steamer to cross the Atlantic, in 1845, and did so in 14 days. Whereas sailing ships took months.

In the old days, you waved goodbye at the dock and maybe years later got a letter. Or never heard. But by the 19^th century, with iron ships, modern propulsion and soon enough the telegraph as well, communication was instantaneous. At last we could begin to live.

Noisily, I imagine, given the two-stroke engines, two of them, six feet long. And precariously, in that the ship took a long time to build and a long bankroll, including the long delay between launching and entering actual service that included a year trapped in Bristol Harbor, and forced her owners into bankruptcy after having to refloat her in 1846 when she was run aground by… human error. Oh. That again.

Sold for salvage in 1852 and repaired, she carried immigrants to the desert paradise of Australia for decades before being converted to sail in 1881, ignominiously reduced to a warehouse, quarantine ship and “coal hulk,” in the Falkland Islands in 1884.

Scuttled in 1937, she was brought back to Bristol in 1970, to the same dry dock where she was built, where she became a very popular tourist attraction.

I wonder if they tell their hundreds of thousands of visitors a year that when it comes to globalization we have been there and done that. And it was by no means all smooth sailing.

On this date in history, July 18, Edward I kicked the Jews out of England back in 1290. I wish it were more surprising than it is.

England really was then, as it long had been and long remained, a land of liberty under law. Its citizens were more free, and free because of sound legal procedures, than virtually anywhere else. But anti-Semitism really was then, as it long had been and long remained, a peculiarly virulent form of hatred and could infect even a healthy body politic. Simon de Montfort, a genuine hero for his role in helping establish Parliament as an effective check on royal authority, also used anti-Semitism as a political tool. That he did so out of conviction not expedience doesn’t make it better.

There weren’t many Jews in England. But those that were, were subjected to popular hatred and legal disabilities that compounded the problem by making them targets of resentment for, among other things, being money-lenders because most legal professions were closed to them. Magna Carta even has special provisions about people who die owing Jews money because under English law Jews had such restricted rights that they could not own land. So if you pledged land in return for a loan and then died, your land went whooshing right past the Jewish lender into… you guessed it… the stained yellow claws of bad King John.

Jews were also forbidden by law to own many of the weapons that everyone else was not merely permitted but in some cases required to own. Which exposed them to periodic massacres including the entire Jewish community of York in 1190. And a century later they got the royal boot en masse.

The Jews were also expelled from France… repeatedly. And famously from Spain, in the same year that Columbus set sail. And they were essentially excluded from England until under Oliver Cromwell it was decided, in a classic pragmatic English finding, that there was no actual prohibition on their presence, that Edward I had merely exercised the royal prerogative to expel a set of specific individuals now long dead.

It is noteworthy that the Jews were readmitted because a leading Amsterdam Jew named Menasseh Ben Israel, fearing persecution on the continent, applied for permission and received it. Although “polite” anti-Semitism remained a feature of British life into modern times, and seems to be reviving horribly on the left, England and then the United States were havens of safety and tolerance relatively speaking.

It is not coincidence that they are also societies that flourished especially by contrast with those from Spain to Russia, to say nothing of most of the Middle East, that doubled down on anti-Semitism. It is a disease that can affect even a healthy body politic. But the more virulent it becomes, the weaker the host initially, the more debilitating it becomes.

Nothing can excuse Edward’s expulsion on, of all days, Tisha B’Av, which already commemorated many calamities in Jewish history. But fortunately it was much more of an aberration in England than elsewhere.

On July 17 of 180 we find the first mention of Christians in Scillium, near what was once Carthage and is now Tunis. Unsurprisingly, the mention is of their being killed for their faith.

It’s an important point to bear in mind as you contemplate the spread and triumph of Christianity. The modern mind tends to dismiss the concept of the Resurrection as superstitious, the product of credulity and blind faith in the feeble minds of our ancestors before we came along and invented intelligence in the glorious present. But even if you give that idea more credence than it deserves for those who accepted Christianity once it was dominant, even sometimes itself violently intolerant, it fails badly in the crucial early years.

Right after the death of Christ, the insistence that He was not really dead, that He had risen, that He was God incarnate and the crucifixion a stunningly unexpected metaphysical act of redemption cannot have been the product of credulity because it was clearly incredible and scorned. If it did not happen, if He was not seen by the disciples, then they must have been either insane or lying.

As mass insanity it is hard to explain. Especially as instead of being stamped out by harsh persecution it spread and ultimately converted the Roman Empire. Did everyone go nuts and, if so, why and how? But as deliberate lie it is even harder to explain. What would it be for?

Before Constantine, Christianity was not supported by governments or public opinion. Quite the reverse. It was persecuted both officially and socially. To be a Christian was not the route to prestige, wealth or power but to exclusion and very possibly a painful and degrading death. So why, in the early days, would anyone pretend to have seen the risen Christ or insist that His death on the cross was not the end of the whole business when the likely consequence would be a rock to the head or another crucifixion?

Ultimately the willingness to endure martyrdom did help establish the credibility of Christianity. But it wasn’t some smooth ploy by the actual martyrs, some cunning plan to advance a worldly agenda of any sort. They didn’t know that one day Popes would be in league with kings and emperors and even if they had, if they were not sincerely convinced of the truth of the faith, what possible use would it be to them as they died gruesomely long before that time? Including, indeed, eight of the first 13 popes who are believed to have been martyred, from Peter himself to six in a row between 125 and 189 A.D.

As the case of Scillium reminds us the fate of early Christians from St. Stephen on down, when recorded, was generally unpleasant, often brutal. So why do you think they did it?

On this date in history the modern banknote was born. On July 16, 1661. In Sweden. Where it promptly died. But it’s very hard to kill an idea, even a dangerous one.

Don’t get me wrong. I think banknotes are good. I try to collect them and I’m not all that fussy about denomination or even nationality. If you have some you’re not using, you know where to find me. And it’s fascinating the way that they evolved from promissory notes with a particular name on them into generic stores of value.

People were understandably reluctant to lug large quantities of gold around with them on their way down dangerous roads to a business deal. So they deposited the actual specie with reputable merchants in return for a piece of paper that said the buyer they were dealing with could bring it back and get the gold. But that meant the buyer had to come and get the gold then limp back down the road and hope the robbers were having a nap. It would be far more convenient if it just said “will pay to the bearer” and then it could circulate from hand to hand.

Mind you one drawback is that a “negotiable” banknote is, like the original gold, worth stealing. The other is that especially if it circulates for a while you can’t be all that certain that the original gold is still in the hands of the reputable merchant or indeed that he (or she) is still alive, in business, solvent etc. Which is where things get tricky fast.

The original Swedish issue of banknotes happened because common coins were made of copper there and an influx of copper forced the mint to produce increasingly large and inconvenient pocket-ripping coins to maintain their value relative to silver. So people started preferring “receipts” for their copper to hauling the actual stuff around and the Stockholms Banco was happy to oblige. Really happy. So happy they were soon churning out far more receipts than there was actual copper. Three years later people called them on it and the result was pretty much bankruptcy all round.

Unlike Stockholms Banco, the banknote rose again. It was just too convenient. And as it did, so did prices, because inflating the money supply was also just too convenient. Indeed, I sympathize with “goldbugs” and other hard money advocates who think it’s essential to have paper money firmly tied to specie. The problem is that (a) it’s not really obvious that the amount of gold available is rationally related to the amount of currency appropriate to the economy (b) it’s not obvious that gold is, as it once was, so incredibly valuable that anyone will take it in an emergency and (c) as the original history of the banknote shows, it’s a mistake to think of “currency” as a rigidly defined category that will stay put.

No matter what you say about actual physical dollars, banks will extend lines of credit, credit card companies will permit purchases without cash on the barrel, stores will offer installment plans, companies will extend one another credit and in a thousand ways they will manage to carry out transactions with the reasonably credible promise of payment in the near term rather than immediately.

So whatever you do with banknotes, the market will find a way. But there are things you should definitely not do with banknotes. And predictably it’s about the first thing people did with them.

Not that I’m trying to be snarky. But July 15 is the date a French soldier discovered the famous Rosetta stone in 1799 during Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, after which it was captured by the British and whisked out of Egypt to be displayed near the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum far from home.

Mind you, if I were being snarky it wouldn’t be at the expense of the British nor even, in this respect at least, the French. Napoleon was up to no good in Egypt as generally. But if his army hadn’t been in Egypt, rebuilding the Ottoman fort renamed Fort Julien, this priceless key to unlocking ancient Egyptian inscriptions found by one of the dictator’s aides-de-camp Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard would probably never have been recovered but instead smashed into insignificant fragments.

The Ottomans, after all, had used it as a piece of rubble in a low, squat fortress constructed under Sultan Al-Ashraf Sayf ad-Din Qa'it Bay, whose reputation as a patron of the arts didn’t prevent him from building another fortress on the remains of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the ancient world, destroying what was left of it forever. For that matter, if the British hadn’t grabbed it, preserved it and displayed it, who knows what might have become of it?

I feel much the same way about the Elgin Marbles. The Greeks keep demanding them back. But my answer is if you liked them so much, why didn’t you take better care of them? Admittedly they were in the hands of the Ottoman Turks whose idea of preserving other people’s classical heritage was “big gunpowder explosion due to carelessness in 1687 in priceless historical building turned into of all things a mosque then an ammunition dump”. But if it weren’t for the British, we wouldn’t have what is left of the Marbles at all; between 1800 and the present they would certainly have perished ignominiously.

The same is true of the Rosetta Stone. It is true that other such bilingual or even trilingual steles have been found since, including two fragmentary copies of the Rosetta Stone itself. But it was the first, and the key to deciphering those ancient hieroglyphs and inspiring much interest in preserving the monuments and artefacts on which they were inscribed or written.

So yap all you want about imperialism and demand your heritage back. But do find time to admit that without imperialism much of your heritage wouldn’t be sufficiently intact for you to demand it back including, in this case, a great deal of what we know about ancient Egypt.

On this date in history Alexander Mackenzie didn’t reach the Pacific and probably said a bad word. Because July 14 of 1789 wasn’t just one more day he didn’t reach the Pacific because he was still trudging down the river that now bears his name, the 2^nd-longest in North America. It was the date he discovered he was never going to reach the Pacific that way because he did reach the mouth of the river and darn it all it was polar bears, icebergs and the blasted Arctic Ocean.

OK, I don’t know exactly what he saw or what he said. But I do know he named the river “Disappointment River” and that’s quite an eloquent name for a river 1738 kilometres long from Great Slave Lake to the not Pacific.

The thing is, it’s not really his fault. He didn’t put the rivers where they were. One guy started exploring the Mississippi, the longest river in North America, and it came out somewhere warm. Another guy, at least as tough, started exploring the Deh-Cho, as the locals called it, and it came out somewhere cold. It’s not a less impressive river, its tributaries extending into four of Canada’s current provinces, draining some 20% of Canada’s land mass. And it’s not a less impressive achievement just because the punchline was “ha ha this isn’t a trade route” and the 20% of Canada it drains is the part you’d least like to win in a poker game.

As for Mackenzie, he wasn’t a man to give in to disappointment. He went back to Britain to study this new-fangled longitude or, more precisely, methods of actually knowing how far east or west you were instead of just hoping you weren’t hopelessly lost or about to crash into something big and hard. The next year he came back and aimed west instead of north from Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabaska, which only Great Slave Lake would consider “south of here”, along with two native guides, one cousin, six voyageurs and a dog called creatively “Our Dog” (since a possible alternative was “Dog Disappointment” perhaps it got off light). And barely nine months later he breezed into Bella Coola, completing the first recorded land crossing of North America north of Mexico only to be chased off by hostile locals before actually reaching the open ocean.

Eight years after that, his journals were published, then he was knighted, and served in the Lower Canada legislature before returning to Scotland and in his late 40s marrying a 14-year-old heiress, having three children, dying of Bright’s Disease in 1820 and being named a National Historic Person this year.

Canadian history is not exactly dull. But it is mercifully free of major crises within its borders compared, say, to France. Or the United States. Or Britain. We never had a brutal civil war. A lot of our great explorers found stuff nobody wanted enough to fight a major war over it. We settled most of our arguments without sticking anybody’s head on a pike. And so it is that Alexander Mackenzie explored our longest river with incredible determination, fortitude and hardiness, found nothing very interesting on the same day they stormed the Bastille in Paris, and went away again with only a snow storm and possibly a torrent of strong language.

My hat is off to him nevertheless. My thick fur hat. Can we go home now?

Speaking of assassination not changing the course of history, on July 13 of 1793 Charlotte Corday assassinated Jean-Paul Marat in his bath. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving victim. Yet it did no good. In fact it did almost nothing.

Marat, you will recall, was a journalist, doctor, amateur scientist and leading French revolutionary firebrand. In some ways this particular Jacobin is a poster child for the danger of intellectuals in politics: cold, bitter, abstract in a shallow way, a deformed and hideously ugly dabbler who made the personal the political in the most unattractive way imaginable, violent and untroubled by scruples. A passionate and intemperate zealot, his solution to almost everything was to kill somebody he didn’t like, and no sooner was one person or group dead than he began ranting about the need to exterminate another.

Indeed, the woman who assassinated him was a sympathizer with the more moderate “Girondin” revolutionary faction who, in characteristic fashion, Marat could not disagree with without demanding they be murdered. Once the Girondins were defeated, even such maniacs as Robespierre began edging away from Marat.

On July 13 of 1793, as he was taking one of the medicinal baths necessary to deal with a painful and debilitating skin condition, Corday asked to see him, claiming to have evidence against those Girondins who had escaped arrest. Naturally Marat had her admitted and promised that they would be apprehended and of course killed. At which point Corday pulled out a knife and killed him instead.

It didn’t work. Well, it did in the sense that he died. But though Corday said during her trial that “I killed one man to save 100,000” the assassination whipped up the Revolutionary Terror to even more horrible heights in which thousands of Girondins and others were executed. As was Corday. And, reasonably shortly thereafter, Robespierre himself.

For some strange reason the assassination made Marat a hero. The painter Jacques-Louis David, an avid revolutionary, painted a famous picture of Marat languidly and glossily dead in the tub. The whole National Convention attended his funeral, at which the eulogy was delivered by, of all people, the Marquis de Sade, who compared him favourably to Jesus, not someone I would have thought either held in high regard. (De Sade had been a political ally of Marat, fittingly, and also fittingly Marat was apparently in the process of plotting his ally’s demise when he was himself struck down on the grounds that even de Sade was starting to find the Revolution brutal and bloodthirsty and was duly imprisoned for the egregious offence of “moderatism”.)

Mercifully, Marat’s coffin was removed from its honored spot in the Panthéon while various commemorative busts were destroyed. But the Bolsheviks couldn’t get enough of him; they named children Marat and renamed the Tsarist battleship Petropavlovsk the Marat in 1921.

So yes, he certainly deserved to die and the sooner the better. But assassinating him did nothing to solve the problem of Revolutionary terror. Indeed, despite serving as a pretext to intensify it, it probably did very little to affect it either way. Once again, oddly, an apparently significant assassination seems to bounce off history.