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On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, a thirty-second gunfight erupted in a vacant lot near the O.K. Corral. When the smoke cleared, three men lay dead. The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral became the most famous shootout in American history — and the cornerstone of the entire Wild West legend.…

On October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP — the operating system that would define personal computing for a decade and a half, outlive its own successors, and become the computing equivalent of a beloved family car that refuses to die. Built on NT, Wrapped for Consumers Windows XP was Microsoft’s reconciliation of its two…

On October 24, 1945, the United Nations officially came into existence as its charter was ratified by the five permanent members of the Security Council and a majority of the 51 founding nations. Built from the wreckage of the Second World War — barely seven weeks after Japan’s surrender — the UN remains the closest…

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…