1440 – Gilles de Rais, one of the earliest known serial killers, suspected to have killed hundreds of children, is taken into custody upon an accusation brought against him by the Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes. Sentenced to execution by hanging and burning, the French serial killers died on October 26 of that year.
John Bull, the British-built steam locomotive was in operation from 1833 to 1866. It is now in the Smithsonian Museum
1831 – The locomotive John Bull, a British-built railroad steam engine, operates for the first time in New Jersey on the C&A (Camden and Amboy Railroad). Manufactured by Robert Stephenson and Company, the first company structured to build railway engines, the C&A used the locomotive heavily from 1833 to 1866, when it was retired from active service and placed into storage.
1966 – President Lyndon B. Johnson, responding to a sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin, writes a letter to Congress urging the enactment of gun control legislation.
1971 – The first Greenpeace ship sets sail to protest against nuclear testing on Amchitka Island. Greenpeace, an environmental non-governmental organization, states its goal verbatim as such: To “ensure the ability of the Earth [and] to nurture life in all its diversity.” Amchitka Island, one of the several islands in the Rat Islands group of the Aleutian Islands in southwest Alaska, was selected by the AEC (United States Atomic Energy Commission) post-WWII to be a site for underground detonations of nuclear weapons. Greenpeace, as well as other environmental organizations and committees, feared that numerous nuclear blasts might result in nuclear contamination of the surrounding earth and water and cause earthquakes that would endanger those on the island as well, depending on the severity, the surrounding region. Amchitka is no longer used for nuclear testing but monitored for the leakage of radioactive nuclear materials.
2001 – George W. Bush, gives a post 9-11 address, foreshadowing an interventionist US foreign policy, leading to the Iraq, and Afghan wars.
Births
1736 – Jean Sylvain Bailly, French astronomer, mathematician, and politician, elected Mayor of Paris (d. 1793).
1857 – William Howard Taft, American lawyer, jurist, and politician, 27th President (d. 1930)
1940 – Merlin Olsen, American football player, sportscaster, and actor
1977 – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigerian author, poet, and playwright
Deaths
1830 – William Huskisson, English financier and politician, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies (b. 1770)
1835 – Sarah Knox Taylor, wife of Jefferson Davis, first and last president of the Confederate States of America (b. 1814)
1859 – Isambard Kingdom Brunel, English architect and engineer, designed the Great Western Railway (b. 1806)
1978 – Willy Messerschmitt, German engineer and academic, designed the Messerschmitt Bf 109, a German World War II fighter aircraft (b. 1898)