February 28 in History

Cuauhtémoc held out for 93 days during the siege of Tenochtitlán. After capture, the Spanish tortured him — burned his feet trying to find gold. He didn't break. For three years Cortés kept him alive as a puppet ruler. Then, during a march through Honduras, Cortés heard rumors of a plot. No trial. No evidence. He hanged Cuauhtémoc from a ceiba tree. The last Aztec emperor died 1,500 miles from home, on the word of the man who'd already destroyed his empire.

Sweden tried to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar gradually. The plan: skip all leap days between 1700 and 1740, letting the calendars slowly sync. They skipped February 29, 1700. Then forgot. Kept February 29 in 1704 and 1708. Now they were on their own calendar — not Julian, not Gregorian, just Swedish. Nobody else in Europe knew what day it was in Stockholm. They gave up in 1712, added an extra leap day to get back to Julian, then finally jumped to Gregorian in 1753. Forty years of confusion because they tried to make a calendar change convenient.

Magnus Stenbock had 14,000 men. So did the Danish commander Jørgen Rantzau. They met at Helsingborg in 1710. Stenbock won. The Danes retreated across the sound and never came back. Sweden and Denmark had been fighting for centuries—over Norway, over trade routes, over who controlled the Baltic. After Helsingborg, they kept fighting. Just never again on Swedish ground. Three hundred years later, they still haven't.

John Wesley didn't want to start a new church. He was an Anglican priest trying to reform the Church of England from the inside. But American Methodists had a problem: after the Revolution, there were no Anglican bishops left to ordain ministers. Wesley asked the Church of England to help. They refused. So at 81 years old, he did it himself. He ordained ministers and sent them to America with a prayer book and articles of faith. The Methodist Episcopal Church was born. Within 50 years, it became the largest Protestant denomination in America. Wesley died still insisting he'd never left the Anglican Church.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad got its charter on February 28, 1827. First in America to carry both passengers and freight for money. But here's what nobody expected: they had no idea what to power it with. Steam engines were unproven. So they tried horses on rails. Then they tried a sail-powered railcar — literally a cart with a mast. It worked until the wind died. They didn't switch to steam locomotives until 1830, and even then, half the board thought it was a fad. Within twenty years, there were 9,000 miles of track across America. The horse-and-sail railroad became the thing that killed the horse-and-sail economy.

The Secretary of State died showing off a gun called the Peacemaker. Abel Upshur was on a pleasure cruise down the Potomac with President Tyler and 400 guests. The Navy wanted to demonstrate their new steam warship's massive cannon. It had fired successfully twice that day. On the third shot, it exploded. Killed six people instantly, including Upshur and the Secretary of the Navy. Tyler survived because he'd gone below deck to flirt with his future wife.

The experimental "Peacemaker" cannon aboard USS Princeton exploded during a demonstration cruise on the Potomac, killing Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, Navy Secretary Thomas Gilmer, and six others. The disaster decapitated President Tyler's cabinet, reshaped his administration's political trajectory, and led directly to the appointment of John C. Calhoun as Secretary of State — accelerating the annexation of Texas.

The SS California left New York in October 1848 with six passengers. Nobody cared about California yet. Then gold was discovered while the ship was rounding South America. By the time it reached Panama, 1,500 people were fighting to board. The captain took 365. They'd been waiting on the beach for weeks. The ship arrived in San Francisco to find the crew had already abandoned it for the gold fields.

Congress cut off funding for the U.S. envoy to the Vatican in 1867. Anti-Catholic sentiment was surging after the Civil War. Protestants in Congress argued the Pope was a foreign monarch, not a religious leader, and taxpayers shouldn't fund diplomacy with him. The ban held for 117 years. Through two world wars, the Cold War, the Kennedy presidency — no official ties. When Reagan finally restored relations in 1984, the Vatican had been a sovereign state for 55 years and held diplomatic relations with 108 countries. The U.S. was the holdout.

The Tichborne case lasted 188 days. Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping, claimed he was Roger Tichborne — the heir who'd drowned off Brazil in 1854. He weighed 350 pounds. Roger had weighed 140. He couldn't speak French. Roger was fluent. He didn't recognize his own mother's face. But Roger's mother recognized him. She was desperate. She'd been searching for her son for sixteen years and gave Orton an allowance of £1,000 a year. The case bankrupted dozens of families who bet everything on the claim. Orton got fourteen years hard labor. Lady Tichborne died still believing the butcher was her son.

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company incorporated in New York on March 3, 1885. American Bell Telephone created it as a subsidiary to build long-distance lines. Bell couldn't do it themselves — their charter only allowed local service in Massachusetts. So they spun off AT&T to wire the rest of the country. Within fifteen years, AT&T had swallowed its parent company. The subsidiary became the parent. By 1984, when the government finally broke it up, AT&T was the largest corporation on earth. It had started as a legal workaround to a state charter restriction.