For most of Asia, including India, this is the day of the autumnal equinox — the moment the sun crosses the equator and day and night come closest to equal length before the Northern Hemisphere tips toward winter. It's also the anniversary of one of the most one-sided battles ever fought on Indian soil, and the night a planet was found with a pencil before anyone pointed a telescope at it.
On this day
1846Johann Gottfried Galle finds Neptune within a degree of where mathematician Urbain Le Verrier predicted it would be, based purely on irregularities in Uranus's orbit — the first planet ever located by calculation before observation.OTFW, Berlin via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0- 1889Fusajiro Yamauchi founds Nintendo in Kyoto to make and sell hanafuda playing cards, 88 years before the company releases its first video game console.
1803IndiaAt the Battle of Assaye, a heavily outnumbered East India Company force under Major General Arthur Wellesley — later the Duke of Wellington — defeats a much larger Maratha army, a victory he later called the finest of his career.Robert Home via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Did you know
Nintendo spent 88 years as a playing-card and toy company before it made a video game — its first console, the Color TV-Game, didn't arrive until 1977.