HISTORY & TIMELINE

16 October

A journey through
16 October in history

From the first operation under ether to the first Chinese atomic bomb, 16 October is a day of firsts, endings and reckonings. This timeline follows the date across two and a half centuries.

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III

A CHANGING WORLD

Early Modern Era

Exploration, political change, scientific development and expanding global connections.

1793

Marie-Antoinette, painted by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun.Image: Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun · Public domain

world · Europe

The last queen of France goes to the scaffold

Marie-Antoinette was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on 14 October 1793 and guillotined two days later, on 16 October, in the Place de la Révolution - now the Place de la Concorde. She was 37. Her husband Louis XVI had been executed in January. She was taken to the scaffold in an open cart rather than the closed carriage he had been given, and observers on both sides agreed that she walked the last steps with composure. The charges were conspiracy with foreign powers and depleting the treasury, with a final accusation against her as a mother that was invented for effect and that she refused to dignify. The trial lasted two days and the verdict was not in doubt. The ‘let them eat cake’ remark she is remembered for was in circulation before she ever arrived in France.

Source: Château de Versailles: Marie-Antoinette ↗

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The 1800s

Industry, empire, invention, reform and a century of enormous transformation.

1846

Robert Hinckley’s painting of the first operation under ether at Massachusetts General Hospital.Image: Robert C. Hinckley · Public domain

science · Americas

The day surgery stopped hurting

On 16 October 1846, in the operating theatre on the top floor of the Bulfinch building at Massachusetts General Hospital, a Boston dentist named William Morton gave a printer called Gilbert Abbott a gas he was calling Letheon, and the surgeon John Collins Warren cut a tumour from Abbott’s neck. The patient did not cry out. Warren turned to the audience and said that this was no humbug. The gas was ether, and Morton had been trying to keep its identity secret so that he could patent it. The secret lasted weeks; the demonstration changed surgery within months. Operations had until then been a matter of speed and restraint, performed on conscious patients, and there was a limit to what a surgeon could attempt. The room is still called the Ether Dome.

Source: Massachusetts General Hospital: ether and the Ether Dome ↗

1859

John Brown, photographed by Augustus Washington around 1846-47.Image: Augustus Washington · Public domain

politics · Americas

John Brown seizes the armoury at Harpers Ferry

On the night of 16 October 1859 the abolitionist John Brown led twenty-one men - his two sons, fourteen other white men and five Black men - into Harpers Ferry in Virginia and took the federal armoury and rifle works. He intended to arm enslaved people across the South and start a war against slavery. He also took about sixty local men hostage, among them a great-grandnephew of George Washington. The rising he expected did not come. Fighting went on around the armoury for two days before Brown and his surviving followers barricaded themselves in the fire-engine house and were overrun on 18 October by federal troops under Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was tried for treason and hanged on 2 December. Northern opinion split between condemning his methods and honouring his cause; Southern opinion read the raid as proof of what it had long feared. The Civil War began seventeen months later.

Source: National Park Service: John Brown’s raid ↗

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The 1900s

War and peace, technological leaps, social change, politics, sport and popular culture.

1923

Walt Disney, who founded the studio with his brother Roy in 1923.Image: Boy Scouts of America · Public domain

culture · Americas

Two brothers and a four-page contract

On 16 October 1923 Walt Disney, aged 21 and recently bankrupt in Kansas City, signed a contract with the New York cartoon distributor Margaret Winkler for a series of Alice shorts. He and his brother Roy set up in a garage on Kingswell Avenue in Hollywood. The company dates its founding from that contract. It was called the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, then the Walt Disney Studio, then Walt Disney Productions. Mickey Mouse arrived in 1928 with sound; the first feature-length cartoon, Snow White, in 1937; the first theme park in 1955. Margaret Winkler, who gave the brothers their start, was one of the few women running a film distribution business at the time.

Source: The Walt Disney Company: how a four-page contract started the company ↗

1934

The chain bridge at Luding on the Dadu river, crossed during the Long March.Image: Rolf Müller (User:Rolfmueller) · CC BY-SA 3.0

world · Asia

The Long March sets out

On 16 October 1934 the Chinese communists began to break out of the Jiangxi base that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies had encircled, starting the retreat known as the Long March. Roughly 86,000 people set out; about a year and 6,000 miles later, some 8,000 of the main column reached the communist base in northern Shaanxi. They crossed eighteen mountain ranges and twenty-four rivers, including the chain bridge at Luding. The march relocated the revolution from south-east to north-west China and left Mao Zedong, who took effective control of the party at Zunyi in January 1935, as its undisputed leader.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Long March ↗

1946

The defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg.Image: Raymond D’Addario · Public domain

world · Europe

Ten sentences are carried out at Nuremberg

In the gymnasium of the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, in the early hours of 16 October 1946, ten of the men convicted by the International Military Tribunal were hanged: Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl and Seyss-Inquart. Their bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered in the Isar. Hermann Göring had swallowed cyanide in his cell the night before, and Martin Bormann had been tried and sentenced in his absence. The tribunal had sat for almost eleven months and established that individuals, not only states, could be held to account for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Nuremberg trial verdicts ↗

1964

China’s first atomic bomb test, photographed for People’s Pictorial.Image: 《人民画报》 · Public domain

world · Asia

China joins the nuclear club

On 16 October 1964 an implosion device on a steel tower at Lop Nur, in the Gobi desert of Xinjiang, was detonated with a yield of about 22 kilotonnes. The project had the plain code name 59-6, after the year and month in which the Soviet Union had promised - and then refused - to supply a prototype. China had built its own. It made China the fifth nuclear power, after the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France, and it came two days after Khrushchev’s removal in Moscow. Forty-four more Chinese tests followed at Lop Nur, twenty-two of them in the atmosphere, until the last in 1996. China declared on the day of the first test that it would never be the first to use a nuclear weapon.

Source: Preparatory Commission for the CTBTO: 16 October 1964, first Chinese nuclear test ↗

1968

Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium with Peter Norman, Mexico City, October 1968.Image: Angelo Cozzi (Mondadori Publishers) · Public domain

sport · Americas

Two gloved fists on an Olympic podium

Tommie Smith won the 200 metres in Mexico City on 16 October 1968 in 19.83 seconds, the first time anyone had run the distance in under twenty. John Carlos took bronze. On the podium, as the American anthem played, both men bowed their heads and raised a black-gloved fist; both stood in black socks without shoes, to stand for poverty. The Australian silver medallist Peter Norman, who had asked what it was about and agreed with it, wore the same Olympic Project for Human Rights badge. Smith and Carlos were ordered out of Mexico by the United States Olympic Committee, and all three men paid for it at home for years. The photograph has outlasted every argument about it.

Source: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture: what’s missing from the John Carlos statue ↗

1978

Pope John Paul II, elected in October 1978.Image: Gregorini Demetrio · CC BY-SA 3.0

culture · Europe

A pope from a country behind the Iron Curtain

The cardinals had already met once that year, in August, after the death of Paul VI; the man they chose, John Paul I, died thirty-three days later. When they met again in October the Italian candidates were deadlocked, and on 16 October 1978 they elected Karol Wojtyła, the 58-year-old archbishop of Kraków - the first non-Italian pope in 455 years and the first ever from a Slavic country. He took the name John Paul II and began his ministry on 22 October. A Polish pope changed the political arithmetic of eastern Europe; his visit to Poland the following June drew crowds that made the point without anyone having to say it out loud. He reigned for nearly twenty-seven years, travelled further than any of his predecessors and was canonised in 2014.

Source: The Holy See: biographical profile of John Paul II ↗

1998

Augusto Pinochet, who governed Chile from 1973 to 1990.Image: Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile. · CC BY 2.0 cl

politics · Americas

A former head of state is arrested in London

Augusto Pinochet, who had ruled Chile for seventeen years and was in England for back surgery, was arrested in a London clinic on 16 October 1998. The warrant came from a magistrates’ court in Madrid; Spain wanted him extradited over the torture of Spanish citizens in Chile. Nothing like it had happened to a former head of state before. The case ran for sixteen months and produced a landmark ruling from the House of Lords: a former head of state’s immunity covers acts done in an official capacity, and torture, being a crime under international law, cannot be one of them. Pinochet was sent home in March 2000 on medical grounds and died in 2006 without being convicted of anything. The precedent outlived him, and so did the effect in Chile, where courts that had left the question alone for a decade began to open cases.

Source: UK Parliament, House of Lords judgment: In re Pinochet ↗

2000 TO TODAY

Modern Day

The events of recent decades that have already become part of the historical record.

2002

The main reading room of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, under its tilted glass roof.Image: Azniv Stepanian · CC BY-SA 4.0

culture · Africa

A library returns to Alexandria

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina was opened on 16 October 2002, about 1,600 years after the ancient Library of Alexandria disappeared. The idea came from Mostafa El-Abbadi, a classicist at Alexandria University, in 1972; the Egyptian government took it up and UNESCO helped raise support from around the world. The building, by the Norwegian practice Snøhetta, is a tilted disc rising out of the ground beside the Mediterranean, its granite wall carved with characters from scripts all over the world. It holds a main library, specialised libraries including a United Nations depository, research centres and museums.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Bibliotheca Alexandrina ↗

RESEARCH

Sources & Further Reading

Selected authoritative references supporting the events on this page.

WHY THESE MOMENTS?

Significance before volume

This page is not the longest possible list of events. It is a chronological journey through 16 October, where each entry is chosen for historical significance, human interest and reliability.

Facts are checked against authoritative museums, archives, universities and reference works. Where sources disagree, the page says so.

EXPLORED THE DEEPER STORY?

Return to the highlights of 16 October

Discover the lighter side of the date with famous birthdays, culture, firsts and lives remembered.

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