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On 21 October 1997, a Swedish journalist put the brand-new Mercedes-Benz A-Class through a routine moose avoidance test. The car tipped onto its side. The footage spread rapidly, and what followed was one of the most significant safety recalls in automotive history. Mercedes fitted electronic stability control as standard across the entire A-Class range, a decision that transformed ESP from a luxury feature into an industry-wide requirement. By 2014, the European Union mandated stability control on all new passenger cars. Studies suggest ESP reduces fatal single-vehicle crashes by up to a third. Also on this date: Fidel Castro fell down some stairs in 2004, prompting headlines that played rather loosely with the word ‘fallen’. In 2015, the world reached the future date depicted in Back to the Future Part II, assessed the lack of hoverboards, and felt quietly nostalgic. And in 1520, Portuguese explorer João Álvares Fagundes claimed a cluster of North Atlantic islands and named them after Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins, a name that lasted precisely as long as it took France to turn up and call them something more sensible.