October 21

October 21 is the 294th day of the year (295th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 71 days remaining.

Events

• 686 - Conon[?] becomes Pope
• 1797 - USS Constitution launched
• 1805 - The Battle of Trafalgar assures British naval dominance during the Napoleonic Wars.
• 1861 - Battle of Ball's Bluff[?] - Union suffers major casualties
• 1879 - Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb
• 1941 - Germans rampage in Yugoslavia, killing thousands of civilians
• 1945 - Women allowed to vote in France
• 1959 - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opens in New York.
• 1959 - Wernher Von Braun and other German scientists move to NASA
• 1967 - More than 100,000 people protest the Vietnam War in Washington, DC

Births

• 1449 - George, Duke of Clarence
• 1660 - Georg Ernst Stahl, German scientist
• 1772 - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, British poet (+ 1834)
• 1833 - Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor and benefactor of the Nobel Prize (+ 1896)
• 1895 - Edna Purviance[?], actress (+ 1958)
• 1908 - Louis L'Amour[?], novelist (+ 1988)
• 1912 - Sir Georg Solti, conductor (+ 1997)
• 1914 - Martin Gardner, American writer on mathematics and games
• 1917 - Dizzy Gillespie, American jazz musician (+ 1993)
• 1920 - Hy Averback[?], film and television director (+ 1997)
• 1924 - Celia Cruz, singer
• 1928 - Whitey Ford[?], American baseball player
• 1929 - Usula K. Le Guin[?], American science fiction author
• 1940 - Manfred Mann, musician
• 1941 - Steve Cropper[?], musician
• 1942 - Elvin Bishop[?], musician
• 1942 - Judge Judy Sheindlin[?], American judge, television host[?]
• 1943 - Brian Piccolo[?], American football star (+ 1970)
• 1955 - Rich Mullins, American musician
• 1956 - Carrie Fisher[?], actress, writer

Deaths

• 310 - Pope Eusebius
• 1558 - Julius Caesar Scaliger, humanist scholar
• 1805 - Horatio Nelson, British admiral
• 1931 - Arthur Schnitzler, Austrian writer
• 1969 - Waclaw Sierpinski, Polish mathematician
• 1969 - Jack Kerouac, American beat novelist
• 1984 - François Truffaut, French film director

Holidays

October 20 - October 22 - November 21 - September 21 - more historical anniversaries