TITLE: September 28: Conquests, Cures, and Leaps into Orbit
Some dates in history stand out because several unrelated moments of daring and discovery land on them. September 28 is one of those. It covers nearly a thousand years, from a Norman fleet on an English beach to a private rocket in orbit. Here are seven of its most remarkable moments.
1. 1066 - William the Conqueror Lands in England
On September 28, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, brought several thousand soldiers, horses and supplies ashore at Pevensey in Sussex, largely unopposed. The timing was lucky for him. King Harold II of England was about 250 miles north, where three days earlier he had defeated a Norwegian invasion under Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge. Harold had to march his tired army the length of the country to meet the new threat. The armies met at Hastings on October 14. Harold was killed and William was crowned king on Christmas Day. The consequences were huge. The Normans replaced almost the entire Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, built stone castles across the country, and in 1086 ordered the Domesday Book, a vast survey of land and property. The conquest also shows up in everyday English. French became the language of the court and the law, and it mixed with Old English. That is why English has pairs like "cow" (Anglo-Saxon, the animal in the field) and "beef" (Norman French, the meat on the table). Every English speaker still carries traces of September 1066.
2. 1542 - Cabrillo Sails into San Diego Bay
Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo was a Portuguese-born navigator working for the Spanish Crown. On September 28, 1542, he sailed his flagship San Salvador into a sheltered harbor he named San Miguel. Sixty years later it was renamed San Diego. He was the first European to set foot on the West Coast of what would become the United States. Cabrillo had been sent north from Mexico to look for a fabled passage between the Pacific and Atlantic and for wealthy cities along the coast. He found neither. What he did was chart hundreds of miles of California coastline and record encounters with the Kumeyaay and Chumash peoples. He died on the expedition in early 1543, probably from an infected injury, and was buried on one of the Channel Islands. Today Cabrillo National Monument on the Point Loma peninsula marks the landing. San Diego celebrates a Cabrillo Festival each fall, and the view from the monument over the bay and city makes a strong contrast with the empty harbor he found in 1542.
3. 1781 - The Siege of Yorktown Begins
By late September 1781 the American Revolution had dragged on for more than six years. Then a rare piece of coordination came together. George Washington's Continental Army and the Comte de Rochambeau's French troops marched south from New York, and Admiral de Grasse's French fleet took control of the Chesapeake Bay. On September 28 the allied army of roughly 17,000 surrounded General Charles Cornwallis's British force at Yorktown, Virginia. The French navy had already beaten a British relief fleet at the Battle of the Chesapeake, so Cornwallis could not be rescued or evacuated by sea. The allies dug siege trenches closer and closer to the British lines and shelled the town. On the night of October 14, American troops under Alexander Hamilton and French troops under Guillaume de Deux-Ponts stormed two key British redoubts. Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781. Fighting went on in small pockets, but the British government lost the will to continue, and the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognized American independence. The siege shows how much the United States owed to its French allies, without whom the victory would not have happened.
4. 1889 - The World Agrees on the Meter
Before standardization, measurement was chaotic. A "foot" or a "pound" could vary from town to town, which caused problems for trade, science and engineering. France introduced the metric system during its Revolution, but it took international cooperation to make it truly universal. On September 28, 1889, the first General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) met in Paris and formally sanctioned new international prototypes of the meter and the kilogram. The new prototype meter was a bar of 90% platinum and 10% iridium, made with an X-shaped cross-section so it would resist bending. It was kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sèvres, near Paris, and precise copies went to the member nations. For the first time, scientists on different continents could be sure they were measuring against the same standard. The physical bar is no longer the standard. In 1960 the meter was redefined by a wavelength of light, and since 1983 it has been defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. The 1889 meeting still started the modern system of shared measurement that GPS, microchips and global commerce rely on.
5. 1924 - The First Flight Around the World
On April 6, 1924, four Douglas World Cruiser biplanes named Seattle, Chicago, Boston and New Orleans took off from Seattle. They were trying to do something nobody had done: fly all the way around the planet. On September 28, two of them, Chicago and New Orleans, landed back in Seattle to a hero's welcome, 175 days and about 27,000 miles later. The trip was extremely hard. The planes had open cockpits and no radios, and they had to be switched between wheels and pontoons depending on the terrain. Seattle crashed into an Alaskan mountain in fog, and its crew walked out of the wilderness after ten days. Boston was forced down into the Atlantic near the Faroe Islands. Its crew was rescued and later rejoined the flight in a replacement aircraft named Boston II. Engines had to be replaced repeatedly along the route, often with parts shipped ahead to remote places by the Army and Navy. The flight showed that long-distance aviation was possible when aviation was only about 20 years old. Within a few decades, commercial airliners were making similar trips in days and then in hours, a change that started with open-cockpit biplanes landing in Seattle.
6. 1928 - Alexander Fleming Discovers Penicillin
Alexander Fleming was known as a brilliant but untidy bacteriologist. In the summer of 1928 he went on holiday and left a stack of Staphylococcus cultures on his lab bench at St. Mary's Hospital in London. When he came back and sorted through them, around September 28, he noticed something odd. A blue-green mold had contaminated one dish, and the bacteria around it had been destroyed. Fleming later said, "When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did." He identified the mold as Penicillium and named its active substance penicillin. However, he could not purify it in useful quantities, and the discovery sat mostly unused for more than a decade. In 1939 and 1940, Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and their team at Oxford worked out how to purify and produce penicillin. Mass production during World War II saved huge numbers of wounded soldiers. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize. Before antibiotics, a scratch or a sore throat could kill you. Penicillin changed that, and it started with a scientist paying attention to a ruined experiment.
7. 2008 - Falcon 1 Reaches Orbit
In September 2008, SpaceX was close to going under. Its first three Falcon 1 launches, in 2006, 2007 and August 2008, had all failed. The company had money for roughly one more attempt. On September 28, 2008, the fourth Falcon 1 lifted off from Omelek Island in the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. About nine minutes later it was in orbit, the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to get there. The payload was only a dummy mass, but the result mattered a great deal. A few months later NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services contract to fly cargo to the International Space Station, and that contract kept the company alive. Falcon 1 was retired soon afterward in favor of the much larger Falcon 9. What followed changed spaceflight: reusable boosters that land themselves, crewed missions to the ISS, and a sharp drop in the cost of reaching orbit. Much of today's commercial space industry traces back to a small rocket that finally worked on a September evening in the middle of the Pacific.
Reflection: The Threads That Bind Us
Seen together, these seven events are connected. A Norman invasion shaped the language this article is written in. Cabrillo's voyage and the flight of the World Cruisers both came from the drive to go past the edge of the map. That drive now continues beyond Earth, starting with rockets like Falcon 1. The 1889 agreement on the meter and Fleming's attention to a moldy dish both show that progress depends on careful observation and shared standards as much as on bold gestures. Each of these moments started with people working under uncertainty: a duke waiting for the right wind, soldiers digging trenches at night, a company down to its last rocket. None of them could know how things would turn out. We live with the results of what they did, and what we do today will shape how some future September 28 is remembered.