On August 13, 1521, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan fell after months of siege, and its young ruler Cuauhtémoc was captured fleeing across the lake by canoe. The island city was one of the largest in the world, fed by an aqueduct that had been cut three months earlier. Hernán Cortés led roughly a thousand Spaniards, but the army around them was overwhelmingly Nahua, drawn from states with their own reasons to see the Mexica fall.

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On August 12, 1865, Glasgow surgeon Joseph Lister dressed an eleven-year-old boy's shattered leg with carbolic acid instead of reaching for the saw. In Lister's ward, close to half of all amputation patients died of infection, and a bone that broke through the skin was usually an argument for amputation. Drawing on Louis Pasteur's work and a sewage disinfectant used on English fields, Lister tested one idea: that wound infection has a living, external cause, and can therefore be blocked.

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On August 11, 3114 BC, the Maya Long Count calendar begins counting days, from a starting point no one witnessed and no one remembered. Scribes reasoned that morning backward into a prehistory with no cities and no writing, then built a system that could name any day across five thousand years without repeating.

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