October 27, 1938: DuPont announces its new synthetic polyamide fiber will be called “nylon.”
October 28, 1420: Beijing is officially designated the capital of the Ming dynasty in the same year that the Forbidden City is completed.
October 28, 1956: Elvis Presley receives a polio vaccination on national TV. This single event is credited with raising immunization levels in the United States from 0.6% to over 80% in just six months.
October 28, 1886 - On this day, the Statue of Liberty was dedicated,
and,
On this day in 1965, construction is completed on the Gateway Arch, a spectacular 630-foot-high parabola of stainless steel marking the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the waterfront of St. Louis, Missouri.
I was living in St. Louis when the arch was completed. The two sides didn’t quite align perfectly at the top, and had to be adjusted.
October 29, 1675: Leibniz makes the first use of the long s (∫) as a symbol of the integral in calculus.
October 29, 1618: English adventurer, writer and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England. (Raleigh was the half-brother of my direct ancestor Sir Humphrey Gilbert. They shared the same mother.)
(It’s still the 29th here.)
October 30, 1938: Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing near-panic in some of the audience in the United States.
October 30, 1961: The Soviet Union tests a 58-megaton hydrogen bomb named Tsar Bomba, to this day the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.
October 31, 1517: Martin Luther posts his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.
October 31, 1995: Canada wakes up (or has stayed up all night) to analysis of the nail-biting Quebec referendum on seceding from Canada. The “No” side won by the slimmest of margins: 50.58% to 49.42%, a difference of 54,288 votes in favour of staying in Canada.
In his speech after the returns came in, the separatist Premier of Quebec, Jacques Parizeau, blamed the narrow loss for separation on “money and the ethnic vote”, which was widely viewed as a statement that only “pur laine” francophone Quebecers were real Quebecers, damaging all the outreach efforts the Parti Québécois had done to non-francophone groups in Quebec.
At a heated Cabinet meeting on October 31, Parizeau was heavily criticized for the speech and resigned. He was succeeded by Lucien Bouchard.
November 1, 1755: The Great Lisbon Earthquakeand the tsunamis that follow kill over 70,000 in Portugal, Spain, and Morocco. Lisbon is destroyed.
November 2, 1920: KDKA of Pittsburgh starts broadcasting as the first commercial radio station. The first broadcast is the result of the 1920 U.S. presidential election.
November 2, 1988: The Morris worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain mainstream media attention, is launched from MIT.
November 3, 1954: Release of the original Godzilla film.
November 4, 1780: The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II against Spanish rule in the Viceroyalty of Peru begins.
Big E. Smallus of Pimpistan is suspected of involvement but a connection can never be proven.
November 4, 1960: At the Kasakela Chimpanzee Community in Tanzania, Dr Jane Goodall observes chimpanzees creating tools, the first-ever observation in non-human animals.
November 4, 2008: Barack Obama is elected as the first black US president.
November 5, 1872: In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100.
November 6, 1814: Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, is born.
November 6, 1995: Art Modell announces that he signed a deal that would relocate the Cleveland Browns to Baltimore to become the Baltimore Ravens. Modell is hanged and burned in effigy in Cleveland. A plaque honoring him at the Cleveland Clinic is pelted with raw eggs. Et cetera.