February 17 in History

The IBM computer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match on February 17, 1996, or rather, it didn't. Deep Blue won one game, Kasparov won three, and two were drawn. Kasparov won the match. But the single game Deep Blue took was the first time a reigning world champion had lost to a computer under standard tournament conditions, and it sent a shudder through the chess world. The rematch came in May 1997. This time, an upgraded Deep Blue won the match 3.5 to 2.5. Kasparov accused IBM of cheating, claiming the machine's play in the second game showed signs of human intervention. IBM denied it but refused to provide the computer's logs and dismantled Deep Blue shortly after the match, denying Kasparov a third encounter. The company's stock rose significantly after the victory. Deep Blue evaluated approximately 200 million chess positions per second. It used brute-force calculation combined with an evaluation function tuned by a team of grandmasters and computer scientists led by Feng-hsiung Hsu. The machine had no understanding of chess in the human sense; it searched a vast tree of possibilities and selected the statistically optimal move. Kasparov, by contrast, evaluated roughly three positions per second but understood patterns, strategy, and psychology at a level no computer of that era could match. The defeat raised questions that extended far beyond chess: if a machine could beat the best human mind at the most intellectual of games, what activities remained uniquely human? The answer, as the next three decades would demonstrate, was fewer than most people expected. But in February 1996, the story was still about one game in a match that Kasparov ultimately won, a warning shot from a future that wasn't quite ready to arrive.

The peasants of Dithmarschen flooded their own fields the night before the battle on February 17, 1500. When Duke Friedrich of Holstein's armored knights charged at dawn, their horses sank into knee-deep mud. The peasants, farmers armed with pikes, crossbows, and agricultural implements, killed over four thousand professional soldiers in one of the most stunning military upsets of the late medieval period. Friedrich's army included Danish troops, German mercenaries, and the feared Black Guard, a unit of Swiss-style heavy infantry that was considered among the finest in northern Europe. The peasants had studied the tide tables and drainage patterns of their homeland's flat, low-lying terrain with the precision of military engineers. Dithmarschen was a self-governing peasant republic on the North Sea coast, one of the few communities in medieval Europe where farmers ruled themselves without a feudal lord. The Battle of Hemmingstedt preserved that independence for another fifty-nine years. The duchy of Holstein had attempted to conquer Dithmarschen repeatedly, drawn by its fertile farmland and prosperous trade in cattle and grain. Each attempt had failed because the terrain favored defenders who understood its seasonal rhythms. The 1500 defeat was the most humiliating, and it echoed across northern Europe as evidence that feudal armies were not invincible. Dithmarschen finally fell in 1559 to a better-organized campaign that avoided the terrain advantages the peasants had exploited. But the memory of Hemmingstedt persisted in northern German folk culture as a symbol of peasant defiance against aristocratic power, a story retold in the region for over five centuries.

Harold Ross promised a magazine "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque." The first issue of The New Yorker had 32 pages and lost $8,000. Born on November 6, 1892, in Aspen, Colorado, Ross was a high school dropout who had edited Stars and Stripes during World War I, developing a sharp editorial instinct for clean prose and precise fact-checking. His wife, Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter, put up half the money for the magazine from her journalism salary. Raoul Fleischmann, heir to a yeast fortune, provided the rest. The debut issue appeared on February 21, 1925, and was unremarkable. The cover featured Eustace Tilley, a dandy examining a butterfly through a monocle, drawn by Rea Irvin. The image was intended as a one-time cover but became the magazine's symbol, reprinted on the anniversary issue nearly every year since. The New Yorker almost folded three times in its first year. Circulation was anemic, advertising sparse, and the content inconsistent. Ross was an obsessive editor who drove writers and staff to distraction with his marginal queries and demands for factual precision. He once wrote over 100 queries on a single manuscript. By 1935, the magazine was profitable. Ross had assembled a writing staff that would define American literary nonfiction for the next half-century: E.B. White, James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, and dozens of others. The magazine published John Hersey's "Hiroshima" in a single issue in 1946, devoting the entire editorial space to one article for the first and only time. It published Rachel Carson, Truman Capote, and Hannah Arendt. Ross died in 1951. The magazine has been published continuously for over 100 years without missing a single weekly issue.

Emperor Jovian died in his tent at Tyana after ruling Rome for eight months. The official cause: carbon monoxide from a brazier. The unofficial version: assassination. He'd just signed a humiliating peace treaty with Persia, surrendering five provinces and the fortress city of Nisibis. His predecessor Julian had died in battle against Persia six months earlier. Two emperors, two deaths, both tied to the same war. The army elected a new emperor within 24 hours. They didn't wait for an investigation.

Musa Celebi seized the Ottoman sultanate with military backing from Wallachia's Prince Mircea, ending years of bloody civil war among the surviving sons of Sultan Bayezid I following his catastrophic defeat and capture by Tamerlane at Ankara in 1402. Musa consolidated control over the Ottoman territories in Europe but alienated his brother Mehmed, who controlled the empire's Anatolian provinces and had his own claim to the throne. Mehmed would defeat and execute Musa in battle just two years later, reunifying the Ottoman Empire under single rule.

Giordano Bruno spent seven years in an Inquisition prison before the Roman Catholic Church burned him alive at Campo de' Fiori in Rome on February 17, 1600. His crimes were theological and cosmological. He insisted the universe was infinite, that stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets, that the Earth was not the center of creation, and that biblical accounts should be read as allegory rather than literal truth. Some of these ideas would be confirmed centuries later. Others remain speculative even now. The Church offered him multiple opportunities to recant. He refused every one. At the stake, his executioners clamped his jaw shut with an iron spike driven through his tongue and palate so that he could not address the crowd that had gathered to watch. He died unable to speak the ideas for which he was being killed. Bruno was not primarily a scientist. He was a philosopher and former Dominican friar whose speculations drew on Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, and mystical traditions as much as empirical observation. His execution has been claimed by secular and scientific movements as an early martyrdom to the cause of free inquiry, though scholars debate whether his cosmological views or his theological heresies were the primary cause of his condemnation. The statue erected in his honor at Campo de' Fiori in 1889 stands exactly where the execution took place, facing the Vatican.

The wave that hit Ambon in 1674 was taller than a football field is long. 330 feet. Eyewitnesses said it came so fast they couldn't run. The earthquake itself was violent enough to level buildings, but the water did most of the killing. Over 2,300 people drowned. Ambon sits in the Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates grind against each other constantly. The Dutch East India Company had a major trading post there. They recorded the losses meticulously — not out of grief, but because each death meant lost labor and trade disruption. The company's ledgers survived. Most of the victims' names didn't.

Pascual de Iriate's expedition lost sixteen men at Evangelistas Islets in 1676. The western entrance to the Strait of Magellan — where the Pacific meets one of the world's most dangerous passages. The islets sit directly in the path of storms that build across thousands of miles of open ocean. Spanish expeditions knew the route was deadly. They kept trying anyway because the alternative was sailing around Cape Horn, which was worse. The Strait of Magellan had been "discovered" 155 years earlier. Spain still couldn't navigate it reliably. Sixteen men gone in a single incident wasn't unusual. It was Tuesday.

The House of Representatives voted thirty-six times over seven days before electing Thomas Jefferson president of the United States on February 17, 1801, resolving an electoral tie that had exposed a critical flaw in the Constitution's original design. Jefferson and Aaron Burr had each received seventy-three electoral votes. They were running mates, not opponents, but the Constitution did not distinguish between votes for president and vice president on the ballot, so every elector who voted for Jefferson also voted for Burr, producing a tie that neither man intended. The decision fell to the House, where each state delegation received one vote. Federalists, who controlled several delegations, despised Jefferson but also distrusted Burr. Alexander Hamilton, the most influential Federalist and Jefferson's long-standing political rival, threw his weight behind Jefferson. "At least Jefferson has principles," Hamilton wrote. "Burr believes in nothing except his own advancement." Hamilton's intervention helped break the deadlock. Jefferson won on the thirty-sixth ballot with ten states to Burr's four. Burr never forgave Hamilton for the interference. Three years later, in July 1804, Burr shot Hamilton dead in a duel on the banks of the Hudson River. The constitutional crisis of 1801 directly produced the Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, which required electors to cast separate ballots for president and vice president. It also produced a personal vendetta that ended in one of the most famous killings in American history.

French naval infantry stormed the Citadel of Saigon, overwhelming its garrison of 1,000 Nguyen dynasty soldiers in a swift assault during the Cochinchina Campaign. The capture gave France its first permanent foothold in Southeast Asia and opened the door to sixty years of colonial rule over Vietnam. Saigon would become the capital of French Indochina.

The H. L. Hunley sank twice during test runs, killing thirteen crew members including its inventor and namesake, before successfully attacking the USS Housatonic on February 17, 1864, becoming the first submarine in history to sink a warship in combat. The Hunley was a converted iron boiler, approximately forty feet long, powered by eight men turning a hand crank connected to a propeller. It carried a spar torpedo, essentially a bomb fixed to a long pole that the crew would drive into the hull of an enemy ship. On the night of the attack, the submarine approached the Housatonic at the surface, drove the explosive charge into the ship's starboard side below the waterline, and detonated it. The Housatonic sank in five minutes, killing five of her crew. The Hunley never returned. When divers located the submarine in 1995, more than 130 years after it disappeared, the crew was found at their stations. The vessel was largely intact, with no evidence of flooding consistent with battle damage. The cause of the crew's death remains debated. One theory suggests the concussion from the torpedo blast killed them instantly. Another proposes that they exhausted their oxygen supply while waiting for the tide to carry them home. The Hunley was raised in 2000 and is now undergoing conservation in a laboratory in North Charleston, South Carolina. The men who crewed it knew the submarine had killed two previous crews before they volunteered to take it into combat.