Also in July 1770
1st: First identified by the French astronomer Charles Messier, Lexell’s Comet passes within just 1,400,000 miles of Earth. That distance, calculated by the Finnish-swedish astronomer and mathematician Anders Johan Lexell, is the closest that a comet has ever been observed. The comet soon disappears from view, however.
5th: The Russian Empire defeats the
Ottoman Empire on both sea and land at the battles of, respectively, Chesma and Larga. Revenge attacks are soon carried out by the Turks against the local Greek population, who are widely viewed as favouring the Russians. 12th: The Nottingham-based weaver and inventor James Hargreaves takes out a patent on his new machine, the Spinning Jenny.
His invention, whose name is said (though possibly erroneously) to have derived from a member of Hargreaves’s family, enables cotton to be spun, drawn and twisted considerably faster than previously, helping to meet increasing levels of demand.
12th: Sir Joseph Banks, a naturalist and botanist on board Captain Cook’s HMS
Endeavour, records in his diary the sight of a ‘kanguru’ near the north-east coast of Australia (in modern-day Queensland) – this is the first time the word appears in the English language. Cook himself, whose ship is undergoing significant repairs following damage sustained on the Great Barrier reef, also refers to the animals in his diary a couple of weeks later.
26th: The German composer and organist Michael Scheuenstuhl dies in Hof. Aside from three keyboard concertos, his success as a composer lies mainly in a series of short, comparably simple solo harpsichord works written for amateur players and largely lighthearted in style.