Legend says Copernicus saw his great book on the day he died.

1543

The first copy of On the Revolutions was brought to him, already gravely ill, in May 1543.

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• Copernicus publishes heliocentrism1543 · Nuremberg. Nicolaus Copernicus's On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, printed in Nuremberg, put the Sun rather than the Earth at the centre. Published in the year of his death, it began the Scientific Revolution.

16th century

More amazing facts

• 1543 · 1547 Ivan IV was crowned tsar in 1547, four years after Copernicus published that the Earth goes round the Sun.
• 1543 Japanese tempura came from Portugal.
• 1543 1543 overturned ideas about both the heavens and the body.
• 1545 · 1571 Silver from Potosí (1545) made the Spanish peso the first truly global currency: from 1571, Manila galleons carried it across the Pacific to China.
• 1545 · 1615 Spanish still says "worth a Potosí" for something priceless.
• 1547 Ivan IV's nickname Grozny meant 'formidable' or 'awe-inspiring' rather than 'terrible' in the modern sense; the English word 'terrible' once meant the same, but its sense has drifted.

All amazing facts (1058) →