October 12th
 

1870 ~ Death of Gen. Robert E. Lee, Leader.

1872 ~ Birthday of Ralph Vaughan Williams, English composer.

1968 ~ Summer Olympics open in Mexico City.

1970 ~ Birthday of Julian, Porn Actor.

1977 ~ Four Palestinians hijacked a Lufthansa Airlines flight to Somalia and demanded release of 11 members of the Red Army Faction.

1984 ~ UK PM Margaret Thatcher narrowly escaped an IRA bomb attack.

1986 ~ Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev failed to agree on Star Wars at a disarmament summit in Reykjavik.

1999 ~ Death of Wilt Chamberlain, American basketball player.

2000 ~ Terrorists attacked the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden.

2002 ~ A terrorist bomb at a Bali nightclub killed 202 people, mainly Australians.

October 13th
 

54 ~ Death of Claudius, Roman Emperor.

1307 ~ All Knights Templar in France were simultaneously arrested by agents of the French king, to be later tortured into admitting heresy.

1773 ~ Charles Messier discovered the Whirlpool Galaxy.

1812 ~ Death of Sir Isaac Brock, British general (killed in the Battle of Queenston Heights).

1925 ~ Birthday of Margaret Thatcher, UK PM.

1943 ~ Italy changes alliances from the Axis to the Allies.

1982 ~ Birthday of Ian Thorpe, Australian swimmer.

1988 ~ The UK government lost the Spycatcher battle

1990 ~ Death of Lê Ðức Thọ, Vietnamese general & politician, awarded one half of the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize.

1992 ~ The UK government announced plans to close one third of the coal mines.

October 14th
 

1066 ~ Battle of Hastings: The Norman army of William the Conqueror defeated the Saxon army and kill King Harold II of England.

1944 ~ Given the choice between a public treason trial followed by death by firing squad or suicide with honor, German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel chose the latter.

1947 ~ Chuck Yeager flew a Bell X-1 faster than the speed of sound, the first man to do so in level flight.

1964 ~ Civil Rights movement leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr became the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

1966 ~ Birthday of Savanna Samson, Porn Actress.

1977 ~ Death of Bing Crosby, Actor & Singer.

1983 ~ Birthday of Vanessa Lane, Porn Actress.

1990 ~ Death of Leonard Bernstein, Composer & Conductor.

1991 ~ Aung San Suu Kyi was named winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

1994 ~ PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin shared the Nobel Peace Prize.

October 15th
 

70 BC ~ Birthday of Virgil, Roman poet.

1844 ~ Birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher.

1964 ~ Birthday of P. G. Wodehouse, British novelist.

1908 ~ Birthday of John Kenneth Galbraith, Economist.

1917 ~ Mata Hari was executed by firing squad for spying for Germany.

1964 ~ Nikita Khrushchev “retired” as head of USSR.

1990 ~ Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1991 ~ The Senate confirmed the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

1993 ~ Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

2003 ~ China launched its first manned spacecraft into orbit, becoming the third country to do so.

October 16th
 

1793 ~ Death of Marie Antoinette – guillotined.

1854 ~ Birthday of Oscar Wilde, Irish writer.

1859 ~ In one of the developments towards the American Civil War, John Brown led a raid of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

1916 ~ Planned Parenthood founded by Margaret Sanger.

1925 ~ Birthday of Angela Lansbury, actress.

1964 ~ China detonated its first nuclear weapon.

1978 ~ Karol Józef Wojtyła became Pope John Paul II. He was the first non Italian to be elevated to the position since 1522.

1981 ~ Death of Moshe Dayan, Israeli general.

1984 ~ Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1984 ~ Birthday of Melissa Lauren, French Porn Actress. Bon appétit!

October 17th
 

1915 ~ Birthday of Arthur Miller, Playwright.

1931 ~ Al Capone was convicted of income tax evasion.

1935 ~ Death of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Spanish neuroscientist.

1956 ~ Queen Elizabeth opened the first commercial nuclear power station, at Calder Hall.

1968 ~ Olympic protest against racial discrimination.

1972 ~ Birthday of Eminem, rap music performer.

1973 ~ Arab oil-producing nations announced they would cut back oil exports to Western nations and Japan; the result was a total embargo that lasted until March 1974.

1977 ~ West German commandos stormed a hijacked Lufthansa jetliner on the ground in Mogadishu, Somalia, freeing all 86 hostages and killing three of the four hijackers.

1979 ~ Mother Teresa of India was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on behalf of the destitute in Calcutta.

1989 ~ The Loma Prieta earthquake hit the San Francisco Bay Area.

October 18th
 

1851 ~ Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, was first published as The Whale.

1871 ~ Death of Charles Babbage, mathematician and inventor of computing machines.

1919 ~ Birthday of Pierre Trudeau, fifteenth PM of Canada.

1922 ~ The British Broadcasting Company was founded.

1939 ~ Birthday of Lee Harvey Oswald, Assassin.

1954 ~ The Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates announced the first Transistor radio.

1962 ~ Dr. Watson of the United States, and Drs. Crick and Wilkins of the UK, were named winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their work in determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA.

1976 ~ Birthday of Azlea Antistia, Porn Actress.

1989 ~ Erich Honecker was forced to step down as leader of East Germany after 18 years in power.

2006 ~ Death of Anna Russell, English music satirist.

1 ~ Moby-Dick, a novel by Herman Melville, was first published as The Whale.

There was a truly terrible version done in 2010 set on a nuke sub converted to hunt a single prehistoric whale. It was sad.

On the transistor reference, our puters are just hyper-sophisticated transistor devices.

Yup.

October 19th
 

1745 ~ Death of Jonathan Swift, Author.

1781 ~ Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, effectively ending the American War of Independence.

1812 ~ French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte began a retreat from Moscow.

1931 ~ Birthday of John Le Carré, Author.

1937 ~ Death of Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand physicist, father of nuclear physics.

1950 ~ Death of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Poet.

1954 ~ Metal fatigue was identified as the cause of Comet crashes.

1969 ~ U.S. Vice President Spiro T. Agnew referred to anti-Vietnam War protesters “an effete corps of impudent snobs.”

1987 ~ The DJI fell by 22% (Black Monday).

2005 ~ The trial of Saddam Hussein began.

October 20th
 

1740 ~ Maria Theresa took the throne of Austria.

1803 ~ The U.S. Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase.

1882 ~ Birthday of Bela Lugosi, Actor.

1893 ~ Birthday of Jomo Kenyatta, President of Kenya.

1973 ~ In the “Saturday Night Massacre”, President Nixon abolished the office of special Watergate prosecutor, accepted the resignation of the Attorney General, and fired Deputy Attorney General William B. Ruckelshaus.

1973 ~ The Sydney Opera House opened.

1983 ~ Grenada's Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop, was assassinated.

1984 ~ Death of Paul Dirac, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1933.

1989 ~ Death of Anthony Quayle, English actor (The Guns of Navarone, Lawrence of Arabia, Anne of the Thousand Days).

1992 ~ The Toronto Blue Jays win the first World Series game outside the U.S.

October 21st
 

1772 ~ Birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poet.

1805 ~ A British fleet led by Admiral Lord Nelson defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar off the coast of Spain.

1805 ~ Death of Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson.

1833 ~ Birthday of Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and benefactor of the Nobel Prize.

1854 ~ Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses were sent to the Crimean War.

1879 ~ Thomas Edison invented a workable electric light.

1917 ~ Birthday of Dizzy Gillespie, Jazz Musician.

1929 ~ Birthday of Ursula K. Le Guin, Science Fiction Author.

1944 ~ The first kamikaze attack: HMAS Australia was hit by a Japanese plane carrying a 200 kg bomb.

1994 ~ North Korea and the United States signed an agreement requiring North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program and agree to inspections.

October 22nd
 

1746 ~ Princeton University in New Jersey received its charter.

1836 ~ Sam Houston was inaugurated as the first President of the Republic of Texas.

1844 ~ Birthday of Sarah Bernhardt, Actress.

1906 ~ Death of Paul Cezanne, Painter.

1920 ~ Birthday of Timothy Leary, writer, psychedelic drug advocate.

1943 ~ Birthday of Catherine Deneuve, Actress.

1943 ~ The RAF air raid on Kassel, a city of 236,000 people, killed 10,000, and left 150,000 homeless.

1962 ~ US President Kennedy announced that American spy planes had discovered Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba, and that he had ordered a naval "quarantine" of the island nation.

1973 ~ Death of Pablo Casals, Cellist & Conductor.

1990 ~ The region around the Aral Sea assessed as the world’s worst ecological disaster.

The destruction of the Aral Sea is truly a sad thing. I read aabout that in National Geographic a few years ago and it's a disgrace that the former Soviet Union allowed it to happen.

:(

It was a resource drawn on until it was no longer there.

The lake may return, but not most of the unique wildlife.