TITLE: September 23: Emperors, Explorers, and a Unit Mix-Up
1. 63 BC – The Birth of Augustus
On September 23, 63 BC, a boy named Gaius Octavius was born in Rome. His family was respectable but not famous. Nothing suggested he would change the world, except that his great-uncle was Julius Caesar. When Caesar was murdered in 44 BC, his will named the 18-year-old Octavius as his adopted son and main heir. The Roman political class treated him as a boy they could use. That was a serious mistake. Over the next 17 years, Octavian outmaneuvered Cicero and the Senate. He formed an alliance with Mark Antony and then turned on him, and in 31 BC he defeated Antony and Cleopatra at Actium. In 27 BC the Senate gave him the name "Augustus," meaning "the revered one." He was careful never to call himself king. He called himself princeps, "first citizen," and kept up the appearance of the Republic while holding all the real power. His reign began the Pax Romana, about two centuries of relative peace across the Mediterranean world. The month of August is named after him. Many of the systems he set up, including a professional army, a postal network, and a standardized tax census, outlasted the empire itself.
2. 1122 – The Concordat of Worms
For about 50 years, medieval Europe fought over a question that sounds minor today: who gets to install a bishop? Bishops were spiritual leaders, but they also held land, collected revenue, and supplied soldiers. Whoever appointed them had real power. Emperors wanted to control their own territory, and popes wanted the Church to be independent. The Investiture Controversy led to excommunications, rival popes, and civil war. In 1077 it also produced the famous scene of Emperor Henry IV standing barefoot in the snow at Canossa, begging Pope Gregory VII for forgiveness. On September 23, 1122, Henry V and Pope Callixtus II agreed to a compromise at the city of Worms. The Church would choose bishops and give them the ring and staff that stood for spiritual authority. The emperor would give them the scepter that stood for their worldly lands and duties. Each side kept part of what it wanted. Historians often see the Concordat as an early step toward separating church and state. It set a principle that spiritual and political authority are different things. Western political thought kept returning to that idea for centuries afterward.
3. 1779 – "I Have Not Yet Begun to Fight!"
On the evening of September 23, 1779, off England's Yorkshire coast, Captain John Paul Jones fought one of the most remarkable naval battles in history. His ship, the Bonhomme Richard, was an old French merchant vessel converted for war. It faced HMS Serapis, a newer and better-armed British frigate. Early in the fight, some of the Richard's heavy guns exploded, killing their own crews. The ship was badly outgunned and started to sink. When the British captain reportedly asked whether Jones had surrendered, the tradition says Jones answered, "I have not yet begun to fight!" The exact wording comes from accounts written decades later, but his determination is well documented. Jones lashed his ship to the Serapis so the British could not use their better guns at a distance. After more than three hours of close fighting, a grenade thrown from the Richard's rigging set off gunpowder on the Serapis's deck, and the British captain surrendered. The Bonhomme Richard sank two days later, and Jones sailed away in the ship he had captured. The victory embarrassed the Royal Navy in its home waters and lifted American morale. Jones became a founding hero of the U.S. Navy. His remains are now in a crypt at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.
4. 1806 – Lewis and Clark Return to St. Louis
The Corps of Discovery left the St. Louis area in May 1804, and for a long time almost nothing was heard from them. By the fall of 1806, many Americans assumed Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their men had died somewhere in the unmapped West. On September 23, 1806, their canoes came down the Missouri River to St. Louis, and townspeople lined the riverbank to cheer. In about 28 months they had traveled roughly 8,000 miles. They went up the Missouri, across the Rocky Mountains, and down the Columbia River to the Pacific, then made the whole trip back. Along the way they recorded about 178 plants and 122 animals new to science, made maps that changed how Americans understood the continent, and met dozens of Native nations. The Shoshone woman Sacagawea was an interpreter and guide, and her presence signaled to tribes along the way that the group was not a war party. Only one member died, Sergeant Charles Floyd, most likely of appendicitis, which no doctor of the time could have treated. Given the rivers, mountains, winters, and grizzly bears they faced, that is remarkable. The expedition fed America's westward expansion, which brought both opportunity for settlers and great suffering for the Native peoples who already lived there.
5. 1846 – Neptune Is Found by Mathematics
By the 1840s, astronomers had a problem: Uranus was not moving the way Newton's laws said it should. Its orbit kept drifting from predictions. Some scientists wondered whether gravity itself worked differently that far from the Sun. The French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier took another view. He suspected an unseen planet was pulling on Uranus, and he spent months calculating where that planet would have to be. Le Verrier sent his prediction to Johann Galle at the Berlin Observatory. On the night of September 23, 1846, Galle and his student Heinrich d'Arrest pointed their telescope at the predicted spot and compared the sky with a new star chart. Within about an hour they found an "object" that was not on the chart. It was within about one degree of where Le Verrier said it would be. They had found Neptune. This was a major win for Newtonian physics: a planet discovered with pen and paper before anyone had knowingly observed it. In Britain, John Couch Adams had made similar calculations, which started a long argument over who deserved credit. Galileo had actually seen Neptune in 1612 and 1613 but recorded it as a fixed star. The story also has a sequel. Decades later, Le Verrier used the same method to predict a planet called "Vulcan" inside Mercury's orbit. It did not exist. Mercury's odd orbit was finally explained by Einstein's general relativity.
6. 1889 – Nintendo Begins as a Card Company
On September 23, 1889, Fusajiro Yamauchi opened a small shop in Kyoto called Nintendo Koppai. It made hanafuda, or "flower cards," which were handmade playing cards painted with seasonal flowers and plants. The name "Nintendo" is often translated as something like "leave luck to heaven," which suits a company built on games of chance. The cards sold well, partly because gamblers often used a fresh deck for each game. Nintendo stayed a card company for decades. In the 1950s it gained a license to print Disney characters on Western-style playing cards. In the 1960s it tried other businesses, including a taxi service, instant rice, and "love hotels," with mixed results. It found its direction in toys and then electronic games. The 1981 arcade hit Donkey Kong, then the Famicom/NES, the Game Boy, and later the Wii and Switch made the old card maker a global entertainment giant. Mario, Zelda, and Pokémon all trace back to that Kyoto card shop. Nintendo still sells hanafuda cards today.
7. 1999 – The Mars Climate Orbiter and a Unit Mix-Up
On September 23, 1999, NASA's Mars Climate Orbiter fired its engine to go into orbit around Mars and then went behind the planet, out of radio contact. It never came back. The probe had flown far lower than planned, dipping deep into the Martian atmosphere, where it was almost certainly destroyed or thrown off into space. The mission cost about $327 million. The investigation found an embarrassingly simple cause. Software from contractor Lockheed Martin reported thruster impulse data in pound-force seconds, an imperial unit. NASA's navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory assumed the numbers were in newton-seconds, the metric unit the interface specification required. Each small course correction added a little error, about a factor of 4.45 on every value. Over the nine-month trip to Mars, those errors added up. Some navigators noticed the trajectory looked odd, but their concerns were never fully resolved through formal channels. The failure became a standard case study in engineering and software courses. It shows why interface contracts need to be verified and not just assumed, why integration testing matters, and why a group's culture has to let people raise small warning signs. The lesson that "the bug is often at the boundary between two systems" is still one engineers learn, sometimes the hard way.
Reflection: How History Connects Us
The seven events on this date span more than two thousand years, but they share some patterns. The Concordat of Worms and the Neptune discovery both came from patient reasoning, one in diplomacy and one in mathematics. John Paul Jones and Lewis and Clark both show people refusing to quit when the odds were against them. Augustus and Nintendo both grew from modest beginnings into forces that shaped the world. The Mars Climate Orbiter shows that our most advanced machines can still fail because of a basic mismatch in communication. Taken together, these stories show that history is mostly made by people facing uncertainty: working out what they can't see, negotiating with rivals, and heading into unknown territory. September 23 is also usually the date of the autumnal equinox, when day and night are about equal everywhere on Earth. That makes it a good day to remember how much the past shapes the present.