October 16, 1793: Marie Antoinette is guillotined at the height of the French Revolution. As she ascended the stairs to the guillotine, she accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot, saying to him “Pardon me sir, I meant not to do it.”
October 16, 1384: Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland despite being a woman.
October 17, 1814: Eight people die in the London Beer Flood.
October 18, 1926 - Charles Edward Anderson “Chuck” Berry is born
October 18, 1867: The United States takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million. Celebrated annually in the state as Alaska Day.
Happy Alaska Day!
October 19, 1973: President Richard Nixon rejects an Appeals Court decision that he turn over the Watergate tapes.
October 20, 1803: The United States Senate ratifies the Louisiana Purchase.
October 20, 1973: The Sydney Opera House is opened by Elizabeth II after 14 years of construction work.
October 21, 1879: Thomas Edison invents the first commercially practical incandescent light bulb.
October 21, 1983: The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
October 22, 1962 - In a televised speech of extraordinary gravity, President John F. Kennedy announced that U.S. spy planes have discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba. These missile sites—under construction but nearing completion—housed medium-range missiles capable of striking a number of major cities in the United States, including Washington, D.C. Kennedy announced that he was ordering a naval “quarantine” of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from transporting any more offensive weapons to the island and explained that the United States would not tolerate the existence of the missile sites currently in place. The president made it clear that America would not stop short of military action to end what he called a “clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.”
October 23, 1958: The Smurfs, a fictional race of blue dwarfs, later popularized in a Hanna-Barbera animated cartoon series, appear for the first time in the story La flute à six schtroumpfs, a Johan and Peewit adventure by Peyo, which is serialized in the weekly Spirou magazine.
October 23, 1956: A student-sparked revolt against Hungary’s communist rule begins. As the revolution spreads, Soviet forces start entering the country, and the uprising will be put down within weeks.
October 24, 1946: A camera on board the V-2 No. 13 rocket takes the first photograph of earth from outer space.
October 24, 1931 - New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River. The 4,760-foot–long suspension bridge, the longest in the world at the time, connected Fort Lee, New Jersey with Washington Heights in New York City.
October 25, 1616: Dutch sea-captain Dirk Hartog makes second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at the later-named Dirk Hartog Island off the West Australian coast.
October 25, 1854: The Charge of the Light Brigade is made during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War). 409 die.
October 26, 1984: “Baby Fae” receives a heart transplant from a baboon.
October 27, 1904 - At 7 p.m. the New York City subway opened for the first time to the general public, and more than 100,000 people paid a nickel each to take their first ride under Manhattan.
October 27, 1682 - Philadelphia is founded