October 16

1793 – Queen Marie Antoinette is executed on the guillotine

1817 – Italian explorer and archaeologist Giovanni Belzoni, discovers the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I in the Valley of the Kings.

1846 – Dr. William T. G. Morton demonstrates the administration of ether anesthesia for surgical operations at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

1859 – John Brown, leading 21 men, raids the U.S. Armory and Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

1875 – Brigham Young University is founded in Provo, Utah.

1882 – The New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad opens for business, connecting Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Toledo.

1909 – Mexican President Porfirio Díaz visits President William Taft in El Paso and Taft returns the visit by traveling to Ciudad Juarez where they narrowly miss being assassinated by a lone gunman who was captured mere feet away from them.

1916 – Margaret Sanger opens the first “family planning” clinic in Brooklyn

1919 – Adolf Hitler delivers his first public address at a meeting of the German Workers’ Party.

1939 – 603 Squadron RAF, flying Spitfires, intercepts the first Luftwaffe raid on Great Britain also making the first fighter kill of the war over the country.

1940 – The Warsaw Ghetto is established.

1946 – 10 Nazis found guilty by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg for crimes against humanity are executed by hanging.

1962 – President Kennedy is informed of the aerial photos taken on October 14 of Russian nuclear missiles being installed in Cuba

1964 – With the assistance of the Soviets,  China detonates its first nuclear device at their Lop Nur test site in Xinjiang province,  a uranium implosion device of equivalent power to the one the U.S. used to bomb Nagasaki

1975 – 3 year old Rahima Banu, from Bangladesh, is the last known case of naturally occurring smallpox.

1991 – A man kills 23 and wounds 20 more people after driving his truck into Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas. One of the patrons, Suzanna Gratia Hupp, left her handgun in her vehicle instead of breaking the law, and later continued to campaign for Texas concealed carry until it was passed into law 4 years later.

1998 – Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is arrested in London on a murder extradition warrant.