TITLE: September 7: Crusaders, Submarines, and the First TV Image
1. 1191 - The Battle of Arsuf
By the late summer of 1191, the Third Crusade had stalled. Richard I of England had captured Acre, but Saladin's army shadowed the crusaders as they marched south along the coast toward Jaffa, harassing the column daily with mounted archers. Richard imposed iron discipline, ordering his knights to hold formation and absorb the arrows rather than charge out and be cut down piecemeal, the mistake that had destroyed the crusader army at Hattin four years earlier. On September 7, near the ruined town of Arsuf, the pressure finally broke. Two Hospitaller knights at the rear charged without orders, and Richard, seeing the moment, committed his entire heavy cavalry at once. The coordinated charge shattered Saladin's line. Saladin's forces suffered thousands of casualties while crusader losses were comparatively light. Arsuf did not win Jerusalem. Richard would twice march within sight of the city and twice turn back, judging he could not hold it. But the battle ended the aura of invincibility that had surrounded Saladin since Hattin, secured the coastal cities for the crusader states, and set up the negotiated truce of 1192 that allowed Christian pilgrims access to Jerusalem. It also cemented the reputations of both commanders as the great rivals of the age.
2. 1776 - The Turtle Attacks HMS Eagle
David Bushnell, a Yale student who had spent years proving that gunpowder could explode underwater, built a one-man submersible he called the Turtle. It looked like two tortoise shells clamped together, was made of oak sealed with tar, and was driven by hand-cranked propellers. The operator sat inside with about thirty minutes of air, steering by a compass lit with glowing foxfire fungus. The plan was to sneak beneath an enemy hull, bore in a screw, attach a time-fused keg of gunpowder, and crank away. On the night of September 6 into the early hours of September 7, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee of the Continental Army piloted the Turtle toward HMS Eagle, Admiral Howe's 64-gun flagship anchored off Manhattan. Lee reached the hull but could not get the screw to bite, possibly because he struck an iron fitting or because fatigue and the current threw off his position. As dawn broke he abandoned the attempt and released the charge, which exploded harmlessly in the East River, startling the British enough that they moved their anchorage. The attack failed in every tactical sense. Yet it was the first time a submarine had been used in combat, and George Washington later called Bushnell's invention "an effort of genius." Nearly every principle of the Turtle, from ballast tanks to a screw propeller to a limpet-style charge, reappeared in the submarines that shaped naval warfare in the twentieth century.
3. 1812 - The Battle of Borodino
Napoleon crossed into Russia in June 1812 with the largest army Europe had ever seen, expecting a quick, decisive battle. The Russians refused to give him one, retreating for hundreds of miles and burning the countryside behind them. By September, with Moscow only 70 miles away, Tsar Alexander's new commander Mikhail Kutuzov finally chose to stand at the village of Borodino. The battle on September 7 was a brutal frontal slugging match. Roughly a quarter of a million men fought across a narrow front dominated by earthwork fortifications, the Bagration flèches and the Great Redoubt, which changed hands repeatedly under massed artillery fire. By evening the French held the field and the Russians withdrew in good order. Combined casualties are estimated near 70,000, making it the bloodiest single day of the Napoleonic Wars and one of the deadliest days of warfare before the twentieth century. Napoleon called it his most terrible battle, and he famously held back the Imperial Guard rather than risk his last reserve so far from France. The victory was hollow. Kutuzov's army survived intact, Moscow was abandoned and burned within days of the French arrival, and the retreat that followed destroyed the Grande Armée. Tolstoy placed Borodino at the heart of War and Peace, and Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture commemorates the campaign it failed to decide.
4. 1822 - Brazil Declares Independence
Brazil's path to independence ran through an unusual twist of history. When Napoleon invaded Portugal in 1807, the entire Portuguese royal court fled to Rio de Janeiro, and for over a decade Brazil was effectively the seat of the Portuguese Empire. When King João VI returned to Lisbon in 1821, he left his son Pedro behind as prince regent, and the Portuguese parliament promptly tried to strip Brazil of the autonomy it had grown used to. Pedro sided with the Brazilians. On September 7, 1822, while traveling near São Paulo, he received dispatches from Lisbon demanding he return and submit. Standing beside the small Ipiranga stream, he reportedly tore the Portuguese insignia from his uniform, drew his sword, and shouted "Independência ou Morte!" The moment became known as the Cry of Ipiranga, and within months Pedro was crowned Emperor Pedro I of an independent Brazilian Empire. Brazil's separation was remarkably bloodless compared to the wars of independence raging across Spanish America, and it left the country as a monarchy rather than a republic for another 67 years. September 7 remains Brazil's national day, marked by military parades in Brasília and celebrations across the country. The Ipiranga site now holds the Museu Paulista, one of Brazil's most visited museums.
5. 1927 - Philo Farnsworth Transmits the First Electronic TV Image
Philo Farnsworth was a 14-year-old farm boy in Idaho when he sketched for his chemistry teacher an idea for scanning images electronically, line by line, the way a plow works a field. Mechanical television systems of the era used spinning disks and produced crude, flickering pictures. Farnsworth believed only an all-electronic system could ever deliver sharp images, and he spent the next several years finding investors who would gamble on a teenager's idea. On September 7, 1927, in a loft laboratory on Green Street in San Francisco, the 21-year-old inventor and his small team transmitted their first image: a simple straight line painted on a glass slide. When the line was rotated, the image on the receiver rotated with it. Farnsworth's image dissector camera tube had captured a picture, converted it to an electrical signal, and reconstructed it on a screen with no moving parts. He reportedly told his backers, "There you are, electronic television." The years that followed were consumed by a bitter patent fight with RCA, whose engineer Vladimir Zworykin had pursued similar ideas. Farnsworth ultimately won, in part because his old chemistry teacher produced the sketch from 1922. RCA paid him royalties, though the delay of commercial television by World War II meant Farnsworth never grew rich from it. His core insight nevertheless underlies every television and camera built for the next 90 years.
6. 1936 - The Last Thylacine Dies
The thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, was the largest carnivorous marsupial of modern times, a wolf-shaped animal with a striped back, a stiff kangaroo-like tail, and jaws that could open startlingly wide. It had vanished from mainland Australia thousands of years earlier but survived in Tasmania until European settlers arrived. Blamed for killing sheep, it was hunted under a government bounty from 1888 to 1909, and disease, habitat loss, and competition with dogs finished the job. The last confirmed thylacine lived at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. Later nicknamed Benjamin, it died on the night of September 7, 1936, after reportedly being locked out of its sheltered sleeping quarters during a stretch of extreme heat followed by freezing cold. The Tasmanian government had granted the species official protection just 59 days earlier, far too late to matter. The only surviving film of a living thylacine, a short black-and-white clip of an animal pacing its enclosure, was shot at that zoo. Australia now observes September 7 as National Threatened Species Day, using the thylacine as a warning about how quickly a species can slip from pest to memory. Reported sightings continue to this day, none confirmed, and several research groups are pursuing de-extinction projects using preserved DNA. Whether or not those succeed, the thylacine has become the emblem of extinction in the modern era.
7. 1940 - The Blitz Begins
Through the summer of 1940 the Luftwaffe had been hammering RAF airfields and radar stations in southern England, trying to win air superiority ahead of a planned invasion. By early September the strain on Fighter Command was severe. Then, after a small RAF raid on Berlin provoked Hitler, German strategy shifted. On the afternoon of September 7, some 350 bombers with 600 fighter escorts crossed the Channel and struck London's docks and East End in broad daylight. The raid killed around 430 people and injured over 1,600 on the first day. Fires along the Thames burned so brightly that the second wave of bombers that night needed no navigation aids. London was then bombed for 57 consecutive nights, and the campaign continued in some form until May 1941, killing more than 40,000 civilians across British cities. Londoners sheltered in Underground stations, backyard Anderson shelters, and church crypts, and the phrase "Blitz spirit" entered the language. Strategically, the shift was a German blunder. Diverting the bombers from airfields to cities gave Fighter Command time to repair its runways and rest its pilots. Within two weeks the RAF had inflicted losses the Luftwaffe could not sustain, and Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely. The Blitz caused enormous suffering, but it also marked the point at which Britain stopped losing the war. Seven events, spread across nearly 750 years, and none of them knew about the others. A crusader knight at Arsuf could not have imagined a hand-cranked submarine, and Ezra Lee crouched in the Turtle had no way to foresee an image of a straight line glowing on a glass screen. Yet the threads are visible in hindsight. Bushnell's failed attack shaped the navies that fought in 1940. Farnsworth's tube carried the pictures of the Blitz into living rooms a generation later. The thylacine's death taught a lesson that conservation laws still cite. History is not a list of separate dates but a single long conversation, and every September 7 we are invited to listen in.