October 16, 1781 – George Washington captured Yorktown, VA, after the Siege of Yorktown. 1793 – Marie Antoinette was guillotined at the height of the French Revolution. 1793 – The Battle of Wattignies ended in a French victory. 1813 – The Sixth Coalition attacked Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of Leipzig. 1814 – The London Beer Flood killed eight. 1843 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton came up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers. 1846 – William T. G. Morton 1st demonstrated ether anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital. 1859 – John Brown led a raid on Harpers Ferry, WV. 1905 – The Partition of Bengal in India took place. 1909 – William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz hold a summit, a 1st between a U.S. and a Mexican president, and they only narrowly escaped assassination. 1916 – In Brooklyn, Margaret Sanger opens the 1st family planning clinic in the United States. 1923 – The Walt Disney Company was founded by Walt Disney and his brother, Roy. 1939 – The 1st attack on British territory by the German Luftwaffe. 1946 – Nuremberg Trials: Execution of the convicted Nazi leaders of the Main Trial. 1951 – The 1st Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in Rawalpindi. 1964 – China detonated its 1st nuclear weapon. 1968 – U.S. athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos were kicked off the team for participating in the 1968 Olympics Black Power salute. 1968 – Yasunari Kawabata becomes the 1st Japanese person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 1970 – In response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada invoked the War Measures Act. 1973 – Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 1975 – The Balibo Five, a group of Australian-based television journalists based in the town of Balibo in the then Portuguese Timor (now East Timor), were killed by Indonesian troops. 1975 – Rahima Banu, a two-year old girl from the village of Kuralia in Bangladesh, was the last known person to be infected with naturally occurring smallpox. 1978 – Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II after the October 1978 Papal conclave, the first non-Italian pontiff since 1523. 1978 – Wanda Rutkiewicz was the 1st Pole and the first European woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. 1984 – Desmond Tutu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 1986 – Reinhold Messner became the 1st person to summit all 14 Eight-thousanders. 1995 – The Skye Bridge was opened. 1998 – Former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London on a warrant from Spain requesting his extradition on murder charges. 2002 – Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity, was inaugurated. 2012 – The extrasolar planet Alpha Centauri Bb was discovered.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 05:34:43 +0000
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