the news

On the evening of October 30, 1938 — Halloween eve — millions of Americans tuned their radios to CBS for a drama adaptation of H. G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds.” What they heard sounded like a live news bulletin: Martian cylinders landing in New Jersey, poison gas spreading, the National Guard annihilated. Thousands…

On October 29, 1969, at UCLA, a graduate student named Charley Kline sat at a teletype terminal connected by telephone line to a computer at Stanford Research Institute, 560 kilometers away. He typed the command “LOGIN.” The system crashed after two letters — L and O. The first message ever sent over the ancestor of…

On October 28, 1886, before a crowd of a million people, President Grover Cleveland accepted the Statue of Liberty on behalf of the United States. “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home,” he said, as the veil fell from the colossal copper figure in New York Harbor. The gift of the…

At 7 p.m. on October 27, 1904, Mayor George B. McClellan gripped the controls of the first train on the Interborough Rapid Transit — New York’s subway — and drove it from City Hall to Harlem himself, refusing to yield the throttle until police intervened at 103rd Street. Within hours, 150,000 New Yorkers had ridden…