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On October 23, 2001, in a low-key auditorium on Apple’s Cupertino campus, Steve Jobs reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a white, pocket-sized device with a mechanical scroll wheel. “iPod: 1,000 songs in your pocket,” he said. The music industry, Apple and the technology world would never be the same. Apple’s Risky Bet…

On October 22, 1978, before a crowd of 300,000 in St Peter’s Square, Cardinal Karol Wojtyła of Kraków was inaugurated as Pope John Paul II — the first non-Italian pope in 455 years, and the first from behind the Iron Curtain. Over the next 26 years, he became one of the most consequential figures of…

On October 21, 1879, in his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, Thomas Edison succeeded in burning a carbonized cotton-thread filament inside a vacuum for over 13 hours — the first practical incandescent lamp. Edison did not invent the light bulb; he perfected it, and more importantly, he invented the entire electrical system to make…

On the evening of Saturday, October 20, 1973, President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. When Cox’s boss refused and resigned, and Cox’s deputy was fired for refusing as well, the two top law-enforcement officials of the United States were gone in one night. The “Saturday Night Massacre”…

On October 19, 1987, the New York Stock Exchange suffered the largest single-day percentage crash in its history. The Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 508 points — 22.6% of its value — wiping $500 billion off American stocks in six and a half hours of trading. Panic rolled westward across every time zone: markets in…

On October 18, 1922, a group of British wireless manufacturers founded the British Broadcasting Company to sell radios and fill the air with something worth hearing. From that commercial consortium grew the British Broadcasting Corporation — the world’s first national broadcaster and, for a century, the most influential cultural institution in the English-speaking world. From…

On October 17, 1931, the most famous gangster in America was convicted in a Chicago courtroom — not of bootlegging, racketeering or murder, but of federal income tax evasion. Alphonse “Scarface” Capone, the boss of Chicago’s underworld and arguably the most powerful criminal in American history, was sentenced to eleven years in federal prison. The…

On October 16, 1923, brothers Walt and Roy Disney signed a contract with a New York distributor to produce a series of short animated films. The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, capitalized with $500 from Walt and $1,500 borrowed against Roy’s life insurance, had begun — and over the next century it grew into the largest…

On October 15, 1997, a Titan IVB rocket lifted Cassini-Huygens from Cape Canaveral on a seven-year journey to Saturn. When the spacecraft finally arrived in 2004, it began the most productive planetary mission ever flown — and in September 2017, it ended with the most spectacular retirement in NASA history. The Schoolbus-Sized Time Capsule Cassini…