On the evening of 30 October 1938, CBS broadcast an adaptation of The War of the Worlds in which Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre presented the Martian invasion as a series of news bulletins interrupting an evening of dance music. Everyone knows what happened next. Millions of Americans believed…

At about half past ten at night on 29 October 1969, a student programmer at UCLA named Charley Kline sat at a terminal and tried to log in to a computer 560 kilometres away at the Stanford Research Institute. He typed L. A colleague at the other end, on the…

The last securely dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at Philae in the year 394. After that, for fourteen centuries, nobody on Earth could read Egyptian writing, and Egypt had been producing written records for more than three thousand years before that. The script was not lost because it was complicated.…

1911 was the year Marie Curie became the first person in history to win two Nobel Prizes. It was also the year the French press tried to destroy her, a mob gathered outside her house, and the Swedish Academy suggested she might prefer not to come and collect the award.…

In 1952 the United States recorded about 58,000 cases of polio. Over 21,000 people were left paralysed and more than 3,000 died, most of them children. Parents kept children away from swimming pools and cinemas in summer and watched for a stiff neck. The iron lung ward was a real…

For most of the seventeenth century, the accepted explanation for why the planets go round the Sun was that they are carried, like straws caught in a whirlpool. This was not a fringe position. It was the view of the most influential philosopher in Europe, it was taught across France…

On 24 October 1927, twenty nine physicists arrived in Brussels for the fifth Solvay Conference, titled Electrons and Photons. Before they finished, they were arranged in three rows outside the Institut de Physiologie in the Parc Léopold and photographed by Benjamin Couprie. Seventeen of the twenty nine held or would…

The claim at the centre of the Principia is that the force pulling an apple to the ground and the force holding the Moon in its orbit are the same force, following the same rule. That is a very large claim, and it can be checked with one division. The…

The first xerographic copy in history reads 10-22-38 ASTORIA. It was made on 22 October 1938, in a rented room behind a bar in Astoria, Queens, by a patent attorney working in his spare time with one assistant, a zinc plate coated in sulfur, a handkerchief and a jar of…

On 21 October 1879, at Menlo Park in New Jersey, a lamp containing a filament of carbonised cotton thread burned for about thirteen and a half hours before it failed. This is usually reported as the invention of the light bulb. It was not. Incandescent lamps had been made and…