November 1, 2026
The man he spared had come to shoot him
On November 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists walked toward the president's front door to kill Harry Truman. He wasn't in the White House. Its interior had been gutted for a...
October 31, 2026
The faces were meant to have bodies
On October 31, 1941, crews stopped work on Mount Rushmore. Fourteen years of drilling and dynamite in the Black Hills of South Dakota had produced four presidential heads, each...
October 30, 2026
The first ballpoint pen was built for leather, not letters
On October 30, 1888, John J. Loud of Weymouth, Massachusetts, received a US patent for a new kind of pen. Instead of a nib, it had a small ball at the tip, held in a socket, that...
October 29, 2026
It wrote underwater. It also wrote on your shirt.
On October 29, 1945, Gimbels department store in New York put the ballpoint pen on sale. For most Americans, it was the first chance to buy one. The store had advertised in the...
October 28, 2026
They hosed down a steel leg so the last piece would fit
On October 28, 1965, workers in St. Louis lowered the final section into the top of the Gateway Arch. At 630 feet, it closed the gap between two stainless steel legs that had been...
October 27, 2026
The battleship that officially never sank
On October 27, 1914, the British battleship HMS Audacious struck a German mine off the north coast of Ireland. She was barely a year old, one of the newest dreadnoughts in the...
October 26, 2026
Norway got rid of its king and then needed a new one
On October 26, 1905, King Oscar II of Sweden gave up his claim to the Norwegian crown. A union that had lasted ninety-one years ended without a shot...
October 25, 2026
The order said the guns. It never said which ones.
On October 25, 1854, near Balaclava in the Crimea, the British Light Brigade rode straight down a valley lined on three sides with Russian artillery. It was the wrong...
October 24, 2026
The wire reached Salt Lake. The horses went home.
On October 24, 1861, two telegraph lines met in Salt Lake City. One had been strung east from California, the other west from Nebraska. For the first time, a message could cross...
October 23, 2026
They cut the statue down and left the boots
On October 23, 1956, students in Budapest marched to demand free elections, a free press and the withdrawal of Soviet troops. By evening the crowd had swollen far beyond the...
October 22, 2026
He said no, and the list kept his name
On October 22, 1964, the Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Jean-Paul Sartre. Within hours, he turned it down.
October 21, 2026
They found the passage. Their biggest ship went home.
On 21 October 1520, Ferdinand Magellan's fleet rounded a headland near the southern tip of South America and found a gap in the coast. It was the feast of St Ursula and her eleven...
October 20, 2026
The building opened. Its architect stayed away.
On October 20, 1973, Queen Elizabeth II formally opened the Sydney Opera House. Crowds packed the harbour foreshore. The white shells on Bennelong Point had taken fourteen years...
October 19, 2026
The wedding was real. The papal permission was not.
On October 19, 1469, Isabella of Castile, 18, married Ferdinand of Aragon, 17, in a private house in Valladolid. Her half-brother, King Henry IV of Castile, had not approved the...
October 18, 2026
It fit in a shirt pocket. Its makers wanted to sell what was inside.
On October 18, 1954, a new radio was announced in the United States: the Regency TR-1, small enough to slip into a shirt pocket. It went on sale that November for $49.95, a steep...
October 17, 2026
The message crossed the Atlantic with no wire at all
On October 17, 1907, Guglielmo Marconi's company opened the first commercial wireless service across the Atlantic. Paying customers could send a telegram from Clifden, on the west...
October 16, 2026
The first man the raiders shot was already free
On the night of October 16, 1859, John Brown led a small armed band into Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They cut the telegraph wires and seized the federal armory, where the government...
October 15, 2026
A viewer asked about a hurricane. The forecaster said not to worry.
On October 15, 1987, BBC weatherman Michael Fish opened his lunchtime forecast with a story. A woman had rung in, he said, worried that a hurricane was on its way. He told viewers...
October 14, 2026
Four hundred and forty men, twenty-four pounds
On 14 October 1913, early in the morning shift, an explosion tore through the Universal Colliery at Senghenydd, in the Aber Valley of South Wales. Most of the men were already...
October 13, 2026
The search stopped. The survivors heard it on the radio.
On October 13, 1972, a Uruguayan Air Force plane carrying an amateur rugby team, their friends and family crashed into the Andes. Forty-five people were aboard. The fuselage slid...
October 12, 2026
He named the island. Nobody can say which one.
On October 12, 1492, five weeks after leaving the Canary Islands, Columbus's three ships reached an island in the Bahamas. The Taíno people who lived there called it Guanahani....
October 11, 2026
The ex-president flew and waved. His pilot had weeks left.
On October 11, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt became the first American president, sitting or former, to fly in an airplane. He was eighteen months out of office and touring Missouri...
October 10, 2026
The president pushed a button. The hills kept sliding.
On October 10, 1913, Woodrow Wilson pressed a telegraph key at the White House. The signal ran by wire and undersea cable to Panama, where it set off dynamite packed into the...
October 9, 2026
The dam held. Almost nothing below it did.
At 10:39 on the night of October 9, 1963, a slab of Monte Toc about two kilometres long broke away and slid into the reservoir behind the Vajont Dam in northern Italy. Some 260...
October 8, 2026
The candy bar melted. The countertop took twenty-two years.
On October 8, 1945, Raytheon filed a patent application for cooking food with microwaves. The engineer behind it was Percy Spencer, who had spent the war mass-producing...
October 7, 2026
Patented in 1952. Scanned in 1974.
On October 7, 1952, the US Patent Office granted Norman Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver a patent for a "classifying apparatus and method." It described a way for a machine to...
October 6, 2026
The opera was for a wedding. The groom stayed in France.
On October 6, 1600, a small company performed Euridice at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. It is the oldest opera whose music survives complete.
October 5, 2026
The safety part was the part that broke
On October 5, 1966, the Enrico Fermi 1 reactor, about thirty miles south of Detroit, suffered a partial meltdown. It was an experimental fast breeder, cooled not by water but by...
October 4, 2026
They planned four presidents to the waist. They got four heads.
On October 4, 1927, workers began carving Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, wanted Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and...
October 3, 2026
The fastest plane came home with holes burned in it
On October 3, 1967, Air Force pilot William "Pete" Knight dropped from under the wing of a B-52 over the Mojave Desert and lit the rocket engine of an X-15. Minutes later he was...
October 2, 2026
He came home with the answer. He sat on it for twenty years.
On October 2, 1836, HMS Beagle reached Falmouth in Cornwall, and Charles Darwin stepped onto English ground for the first time in almost five years. He had sailed from Plymouth in...
October 1, 2026
The car stayed put for thirty-two hours
On October 1, 1964, campus police at the University of California, Berkeley arrested Jack Weinberg for staffing a civil-rights table on Sproul Plaza. The university had banned...
September 30, 2026
The paper promised peace. Prague fell in March.
Shortly after 1 a.m. on September 30, 1938, the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Italy signed an agreement in Munich. It handed the Sudetenland, a border region of...
September 29, 2026
The sea got into the wiring
On 29 September 1885, electric trams began carrying passengers along the seafront at Blackpool. It was one of the first electric street tramways anywhere in the world, running in...
September 28, 2026
Three rockets failed. The fourth carried nothing.
On September 28, 2008, a small rocket called Falcon 1 lifted off from Omelek, a speck of coral in the Marshall Islands' Kwajalein Atoll, and reached Earth orbit. It was the first...
September 27, 2026
The car that defined the assembly line was built without one
On September 27, 1908, workers at Ford's Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit finished the first production Model T. It was a tall, plain car with a four-cylinder engine and high...
September 26, 2026
Two years of rust, then a slide into the Clyde
On September 26, 1934, the hull known only as Number 534 slid down a slipway at John Brown's shipyard in Clydebank and into the River Clyde. Queen Mary named the ship after...
September 25, 2026
They left the last page blank. The council blanked the rest.
On September 25, 1690, Benjamin Harris printed the first multi-page newspaper in the American colonies. Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick came off a Boston press as...
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