September 12 in History

A committee of junior military officers called the Derg (Amharic for "committee") deposed Emperor Haile Selassie on September 12, 1974, ending a reign that had lasted 58 years and a dynasty that claimed descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Selassie, 82 and increasingly frail, was driven from the palace in a Volkswagen Beetle. The Derg executed 60 officials of the old regime without trial on November 23. Haile Selassie himself was almost certainly murdered in 1975, reportedly smothered in his bed. The Derg, led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, imposed a Marxist military dictatorship that killed an estimated 500,000 to 750,000 people during the "Red Terror" and presided over the devastating famine of 1984-85.

Steve Biko died in police custody on September 12, 1977, from massive brain injuries sustained during interrogation by South African security police in Port Elizabeth. He was 30. Biko had been the founder of the Black Consciousness Movement, which rejected white liberal leadership of the anti-apartheid struggle and insisted that Black South Africans must define their own liberation. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act, which allowed indefinite detention without trial. After being beaten, he was transported 750 miles to Pretoria in the back of a Land Rover while naked and comatose. The inquest found no one responsible. Minister of Justice Jimmy Kruger said Biko's death "left him cold." International outrage accelerated sanctions against the apartheid regime.

Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit to his colleagues at Texas Instruments on September 12, 1958, showing them a piece of germanium roughly half an inch long with protruding wires. When he applied current, an oscilloscope displayed a sine wave, proving that a transistor, capacitor, and resistor could all be fabricated on a single semiconductor chip. Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor independently developed a superior silicon version using planar processing months later. Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000; Noyce, who had died in 1990, did not share it. The integrated circuit is the foundation of every modern electronic device, from smartphones to spacecraft, and its invention launched the digital revolution.

Norman Borlaug died at 95, having saved more lives than any other person in history through his development of high-yield, disease-resistant wheat strains that averted mass famine across Asia and Latin America. His Green Revolution fed over a billion people who would have otherwise starved, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize and the unofficial title "Father of the Green Revolution."

A coalition army of roughly 84,000 troops from Poland, the Holy Roman Empire, Bavaria, Saxony, and other German states smashed the Ottoman siege of Vienna on September 12, 1683. Polish King Jan III Sobieski led the decisive charge with 18,000 cavalry, including 3,000 Polish winged hussars, crashing into the Ottoman camp in what remains the largest cavalry charge in history. Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha fled the field, abandoning his army. The Ottomans lost 15,000 killed and their entire camp with all its treasures. Sobieski reportedly adapted Julius Caesar: "I came, I saw, God conquered." The victory permanently ended Ottoman expansion into Central Europe and launched a Habsburg counteroffensive that stripped the Ottomans of Hungary within fifteen years.

American militia forces under General Samuel Smith engaged a British land force at the Battle of North Point on September 12, 1814, killing Major General Robert Ross, the same commander who had burned Washington three weeks earlier. Ross was shot by sharpshooters Daniel Wells and Henry McComas while leading from the front. Without Ross, the British advance on Baltimore stalled. The following night, the Royal Navy bombarded Fort McHenry for 25 hours without compelling its surrender. Francis Scott Key, a lawyer held aboard a British truce ship during the bombardment, watched the flag still flying at dawn and wrote a poem he titled "Defence of Fort McHenry." Set to the tune of a British drinking song, it became "The Star-Spangled Banner," America's national anthem.

Captain William Lewis Herndon stayed on the bridge after ordering women and children into lifeboats. The SS Central America was taking on water 160 miles offshore in a Category 2 hurricane, carrying 477 passengers and 578 mailbags of California gold. Herndon went down with the ship in full dress uniform. The 13 to 15 tons of gold — worth roughly $2 billion today — sat on the ocean floor for 130 years before a recovery team found it in 1988. The wreck triggered one of the messiest treasure-salvage legal battles in American history.

Leó Szilárd had just read H.G. Wells' novel 'The World Set Free,' which described atomic bombs destroying cities, when he stepped off the curb at Southampton Row. The traffic light turned red. He waited. And standing there, he worked out that if a neutron could split an atom and release two neutrons, those two could split two more atoms, releasing four — and so on, indefinitely. He filed a patent on the chain reaction in 1934 and assigned it to the British Admiralty to keep it secret. He'd just invented the theoretical basis for both nuclear power and the atomic bomb, at a traffic light.