Catherine II bought the hard-up Diderot's library, let him keep the books, made him their salaried librarian — and paid his salary 50 years in advance.

1766

◍ Show on the globe

The event

• Accession of Catherine the Great1762 · Saint Petersburg. In July 1762 the guards overthrew Emperor Peter III and placed his wife Catherine on the throne. During her 34-year reign Russia expanded south and west, and reforms were pursued in the spirit of the Enlightenment.

18th century

More amazing facts

• 1762 The sandwich is named after an earl.
• 1765 · 1782 · 1789 Marie Antoinette almost certainly never said 'Let them eat cake'. Rousseau attributed the line to 'a great princess' around 1765, when the future queen was nine and living in Vienna.
• 1768 · 1796 Catherine the Great was inoculated against smallpox 28 years before Jenner's vaccine.
• 1769 · 1820 Antarctica was first sighted only in 1820, by the Bellingshausen–Lazarev expedition — by then Watt's steam engine was already half a century old.
• 1769 · 1815 The victor and the vanquished of Waterloo were the same age: Wellington was born on 1 May 1769, Napoleon on 15 August that same year.
• 1769 · 1771 The world's first car, legend says, also had the first crash.

All amazing facts (1058) →