Edmond Halley predicted that a comet would return in 1758 but did not live to see it. He died in 1742; the comet came back on schedule and was named after him.
More amazing facts
- 1701 No one sits on the Ashanti kingdom's sacred throne.
- 1703 · 1739 · 1833 Peter the Great never spoke of cutting a 'window to Europe'. The phrase is Pushkin's, from The Bronze Horseman (1833), and as he noted himself, the image came from the Italian writer Francesco Algarotti.
- 1704 Pushkin's great-grandfather came to Russia as a boy, a 'gift' for Peter I. African-born Abram Gannibal became the tsar's godson, a military engineer and a general — and his great-grandson Russia's greatest poet.
- 1707 The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, who ruled almost all of India, wanted his burial paid for with money earned sewing caps and copying the Quran.
- 1709 The brutal winter of 1709, the 'Great Frost', struck all of Europe and wore down Charles XII's Swedish army before Poltava.
- 1709 · 1718 The pirate republic in the Bahamas was ended by the man who rescued the real Robinson Crusoe.