the news

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…

On October 14, 2012, Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner rode a helium balloon 39 kilometers above the New Mexico desert — to the edge of space — and stepped out. In free fall, he broke the sound barrier with his body, reaching 1,357 km/h before his parachute opened. Roughly eight million people watched live on YouTube,…

At 11:11 p.m. on October 13, 2010, Florencio Ávalos emerged from a 21-inch capsule at the San José copper mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert — the first of 33 miners rescued after 69 days trapped 700 meters underground. More than a billion people watched live on television and online as, one by one, the last…

Before dawn on October 12, 1492, a lookout aboard the Spanish ship Pinta sighted land — an island in the Bahamas the inhabitants called Guanahani. Christopher Columbus, commanding three ships on a westward voyage backed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, had reached the Americas. The encounter he opened between the hemispheres transformed…

On October 11, 1968, an eleven-day flight began that almost nobody thought should happen. Twenty-one months after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts on the launch pad, Apollo 7 carried Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham into Earth orbit — NASA’s first crewed mission in nearly two years, and the test that decided…