Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

Tai Ping Koon was established in 1860 serving Western food to Chinese diners, and in doing so more or less invented the genre Hong Kong calls soy-sauce Western - Swiss chicken wings in a sweet soy braise, baked pork chop rice, souffle to finish. It began in Canton and became a Hong Kong business alone when the Canton branch was confiscated and closed in 1956.

The Metropolitan Railway opened between Paddington and Farringdon on January 10, 1863, the world's first underground railway and the ancestor of every metro system shown in Moving Millions Every Day.

Quanjude opened in 1864 and made its name on a method: hanging the ducks in an open oven over fruitwood rather than closing them in, which crisps the skin differently. The dish it standardised is the one the world now calls Peking duck, and the carving at the table is part of it.

During the 1867 Exposition Universelle, Paris opened Baron Haussmann's newly rebuilt sewer network to public tours for the first time, turning Eugène Belgrand's engineering into a civic showcase.

Dmitri Mendeleev's paper The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements is read to the Russian Chemical Society in St Petersburg, arranging the known elements by atomic weight and valence and leaving gaps for elements not yet found.

The Suez Canal was inaugurated on 17 November 1869, linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea after ten years of digging. A procession of ships headed by the French imperial yacht L'Aigle, carrying Empress Eugenie, entered the canal at Port Said.

Leopold Cafe was founded in Colaba in 1871 by Irani immigrants, part of the wave of Zoroastrian cafes that shaped how Bombay eats out, and has outlasted almost all of them. It became a fixture for travellers along the Causeway, and was one of the sites attacked in November 2008 - it reopened days afterwards and kept the bullet marks in its walls.

New York's Brooklyn Bridge opened to the public, completing a 13-year construction effort that Emily Warren Roebling steered to completion after her husband was incapacitated by decompression sickness.

The third explosion of 27 August 1883 destroyed over 70% of the island and remains the loudest sound in recorded history, audible in Perth and near Mauritius. The eruption and its tsunamis killed at least 36,417 people.

The Doyle family began selling fish on the sand at Watsons Bay in 1885, looking back across the harbour at the city, and the business has stayed in the family for five generations - one of the oldest restaurants in Australia still run by the people whose name is on it.

Bavaria's unfinished fairy-tale castle, built for King Ludwig II and left incomplete at his sudden death, opened to paying visitors for the first time.

President Grover Cleveland dedicates Frédéric Bartholdi's monumental copper figure on Bedloe's Island, capping a decade of Franco-American fundraising and engineering.

After decades of stalled funding and a visible change in stone partway up its shaft, the Washington Monument finally opened its doors to visitors in 1888.

Gustave Eiffel’s engineering firm finished the Eiffel Tower in Paris after just over two years of construction, built as the entrance arch for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. The 300-metre iron lattice tower was the tallest man-made structure in the world at the time.

The Forth Bridge, a railway cantilever spanning the Firth of Forth in Scotland, was formally opened by the Prince of Wales on 4 March 1890, some months after the structure itself was finished in November 1889. Designed by John Fowler and Benjamin Baker and built by Sir William Arrol & Co., it was Britain's first major all-steel structure and the world's longest cantilever bridge span.

Henry Zietz opened the Buckhorn Exchange on 17 November 1893 across from the rail yards, and it holds Colorado liquor licence number one. The walls carry several hundred mounted animals and the menu still runs to elk, buffalo and rattlesnake.

Confeitaria Colombo opened in 1894 and fitted itself out like a Parisian tea room transplanted to the tropics - Belgian mirrors, Italian marble, a jacaranda counter and a stained-glass skylight over the hall. It became the meeting room of Rio's belle epoque and is now listed as heritage.

The café that became the meeting room of Catalan modernisme opened on 12 June 1897 in the Casa Martí, a Puig i Cadafalch building in the Gothic Quarter. It lasted only six years in its first run, but in them it hosted Picasso's first solo exhibition and the circle around Rusiñol and Casas - and he drew its menu card.

On 28 August 1898 New Bern, North Carolina, pharmacist Caleb Bradham renamed his carbonated "Brad's Drink" as Pepsi-Cola, the name from which PepsiCo takes its own.

Marie and Pierre Curie announce radium to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris, five days after isolating it from pitchblende ore mined at Jachymov. It is the second element they identify that year, after polonium.

The Paris Métro's first line opened to the public on 19 July 1900, running between Porte Maillot and Porte de Vincennes.

A Category 4 hurricane drove a storm surge of over 15 ft across Galveston Island, killing between 6,000 and 12,000 people. It remains the deadliest natural disaster in United States history.

The US Navy commissioned USS Holland (SS-1), designed by Irish-American engineer John Philip Holland, becoming the first submarine in an unbroken line of US Navy submarines.

The house that made xiaolongbao a Shanghai export was established in 1900, selling the thin-skinned soup dumplings that had been developed in Nanxiang town on the city's edge a couple of decades earlier. Queues for them became a fixture of the old city, and the name is now on branches across Shanghai and abroad.

Theatercaféen opened in 1900 across the street from Oslo's National Theatre and became the room where Norwegian actors, writers and politicians ate after curtain - a Viennese-style café with a gallery, caricatures of its regulars on the walls and live music from a balcony.

On 16 June 1903 in Detroit Henry Ford and a group of investors signed the incorporation papers for Ford Motor Company; the filing reached the Michigan Secretary of State the next day and the first Model A order followed within a month.

Orville Wright flew 120 feet in 12 seconds over the sand at Kill Devil Hills, the first sustained flight by a manned, powered, controlled heavier-than-air aircraft. The brothers flew four times that day; Wilbur’s fourth and last covered 852 feet in 59 seconds.

Swan Oyster Depot opened on Polk Street in 1903 and has run more or less continuously since, pausing only to rebuild after the 1906 earthquake. It is barely a restaurant - a marble counter with about eighteen stools, no tables, no kitchen to speak of - and has been run by the same family for generations, serving the same short list of cold shellfish.

The East Indian Railway brought its new Howrah terminus, designed by Halsey Ricardo, into service across the Hooghly from Kolkata, replacing the original 1854 station building. Its North Wing's six platforms were built to absorb traffic that had grown sharply since the Bengal-Nagpur Railway opened its Calcutta Extension Line into Howrah in 1900.

Adriano Telles opened A Brasileira in 1905 to sell Brazilian coffee by the sack, gave cups away to persuade Lisbon to drink it, and ended up with the café that the city's writers colonised. Fernando Pessoa sits in bronze at a table outside it.

A magnitude 7.9 rupture of the San Andreas Fault shook Northern California at 5:12 a.m. local time, and the fires that followed burned for days. More than 3,000 died and over 80% of the city was destroyed.

On 28 August 1907 James E. Casey and Claude Ryan began the American Messenger Service in a basement at Second Avenue and Main Street in Seattle with US$100 borrowed from Ryan's uncle, the company that became United Parcel Service.

Wilhelm Maybach and his son Karl found Luftfahrzeug-Motorenbau GmbH at Bissingen an der Enz, the airship-engine works that moved to Friedrichshafen in 1911-12 and grew into MTU, today the mega-diesel engine brand of Rolls-Royce Power Systems profiled in this documentary.

Victorian Railways finished the current Flinders Street Station building in Melbourne, replacing earlier structures with the Federation Free Classical terminus still in use today. The building was essentially finished in 1909, with the official opening the following year.

Monaco's Prince Albert I inaugurated the Oceanographic Museum, an institution he founded to house his marine research, after eleven years of construction into a cliff face above the Mediterranean. The museum, later directed by Jacques Cousteau, remains one of the world's foremost centres for oceanography.

On December 1, 1913, Ford Motor Company extended its moving line at the Highland Park plant to assemble a complete Model T chassis start to finish, cutting build time from over 12 hours to about 93 minutes.

Joe's opened on Miami Beach in 1913, before the causeway, and built itself around a shellfish nobody was eating: the stone crab, whose claws regrow, served chilled with mustard sauce. It closes for the summer when the season shuts and takes no reservations, which has not thinned the queue in a century.

The Panama Canal opened to commercial traffic on 15 August 1914 when the Panama Railroad steamer SS Ancon made the first official transit. The outbreak of World War I cancelled the planned grand celebration.

Albert Einstein reads The Field Equations of Gravitation to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, giving general relativity its final form after an inconsistency with observation sent him back to the drawing board.

A camp cook reported sick at Fort Riley's Camp Funston in Kansas, and within days hundreds of soldiers were down with influenza. It is the first recorded outbreak of the pandemic that killed more people than the war it travelled with - somewhere between 25 and 50 million.

Arthur Eddington presents the results of the May 1919 eclipse expeditions to Principe and Sobral at a joint session of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society at Burlington House. The measured deflection of starlight matches Einstein's prediction, and the meeting accepts it.

Cadbury's first factory outside Britain officially opened at Claremont on Hobart's Derwent River on October 21, 1921, drawn by Tasmania's cheap hydroelectricity and reliable dairy supply. The site still turns local milk and sugar into millions of Easter eggs and bunnies each year.

Hulda Zumsteg took over the Kronenhalle in 1924 and ran it for half a century, taking paintings in part payment and hanging them where the diners sat - so the walls now carry Chagall, Miró, Picasso and Matisse above the tables where Joyce and Giacometti ate.

Charles Lindbergh flew the Ryan NYP from Roosevelt Airfield on Long Island to Le Bourget in Paris, 3,600 miles in 33 hours and 30 minutes, the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight. It won him the $25,000 Orteig Prize.

The St. Francis Dam in San Francisquito Canyon failed just before midnight on 12 March 1928, sending a flood about 55 miles to the Pacific and killing more than 400 people.

Reuben Schwartz opened his delicatessen on Saint-Laurent Boulevard on 31 December 1928, and it has smoked brisket the same way since - dry-cured with no nitrates, ten days in the cure, served hand-cut on rye. The queue outside the narrow room is a Montreal fixture.

Frank Gordy opened the Varsity in 1928 beside Georgia Tech, and it grew into what it still calls the world's largest drive-in - two blocks of car park, a counter shouting What'll ya have, and chili dogs, onion rings and Frosted Orange by the ton on a football Saturday.

Pat Olivieri's stand at Ninth and Passyunk began selling chopped beef on a roll in 1930, which is the origin story the cheesesteak is usually given. The corner now holds it and its rival Geno's on opposite sides of the street, both open around the clock.

Ford-Werke produced its first vehicle, a Model A-based truck, at the new Cologne-Niehl plant, the German headquarters Henry Ford himself helped establish with Mayor Konrad Adenauer the year before. The site grew into the mini-city-sized mega factory shown in this documentary.

Months of flooding along the Yangtze and Huai rivers inundated Wuhan, Nanjing and beyond, culminating in a dike breach at Lake Gaoyou on 25 August. Estimates of the dead run from 150,000 drowned to two million in total.