HISTORY & TIMELINE

19 October

A journey through
19 October in history

From the fall of Roman Africa in 439 to a soil bacterium that cured tuberculosis, 19 October is a day of endings that turned out to be beginnings. This timeline follows the date across fifteen centuries.

Begin the Timeline ↓ ← Back to Explore This Day

EARLIEST RECORDS

Ancient & Early History

The earliest worthwhile records and events connected with this date.

439

A silver Vandal coin bearing the name of Gaiseric.

A silver coin of Gaiseric, king of the Vandals and Alans.Image: Unknown authorUnknown author · CC BY-SA 2.5

world · Africa

The Vandals take Carthage

On 19 October 439 Gaiseric, king of the Vandals, took Carthage and threw off the arrangement under which he had nominally held North Africa on Rome’s behalf. He made the city his capital. His people - some 80,000 of them, by the figure the sources give - had crossed from Spain into Africa ten years earlier and had met very little that could stop them. It was a heavier blow than the size of the army suggests. Roman Africa was the western empire’s granary and one of its richest tax provinces, and Carthage was its second city. With it Gaiseric acquired a fleet, and with the fleet the western Mediterranean; in 455 he sacked Rome itself. Rome recognised the Vandal kingdom by treaty in 442. Byzantium did not take Africa back for nearly a century.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Gaiseric ↗

III

A CHANGING WORLD

Early Modern Era

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

1781

Auguste Couder’s painting of the siege of Yorktown.Image: Unknown · Public domain

world · Americas

Cornwallis gives up at Yorktown

Lord Cornwallis had taken his army onto a peninsula in Virginia to wait for the Royal Navy. The navy did not come: Admiral de Grasse’s French fleet held the mouth of the Chesapeake, and about 17,000 American and French troops under Washington and Rochambeau dug siege lines around the town. After three weeks of bombardment, Cornwallis surrendered some 8,000 men on 19 October 1781. Washington refused the traditional honours of war, because the British had refused them to the Americans at Charleston the year before, so the defeated army marched out with its colours cased. Cornwallis pleaded illness and sent his second-in-command. Fighting dragged on elsewhere for two more years, but Yorktown effectively ended the war in North America, and the Treaty of Paris followed in 1783.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Siege of Yorktown ↗

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

The 1800s

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

1812

Adolph Northen’s nineteenth-century painting of the retreat from Moscow.Image: Adolph Northen · Public domain

world · Europe

Napoleon turns back from Moscow

Napoleon had held Moscow for a month, in a city largely burnt and empty, waiting for a Russian offer of terms that never came. Wintering there was impossible and politically dangerous. On 19 October 1812 the Grande Armée - by then about 110,000 men - marched out and began to go home. He intended to take a southern route through country his army had not already stripped, but Kutuzov blocked him at Maloyaroslavets on 24 October and he turned back onto the road he had come by. What followed is one of the worst military catastrophes on record: hunger, typhus, Cossack raids, the crossing of the Berezina and an early, brutal winter. Of roughly 600,000 men who had entered Russia in June, something like 112,000 came out.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Napoleonic Wars, the retreat from Moscow ↗

1900

Max Planck, photographed by Hugo Erfurth.Image: Hugo Erfurth · Public domain

science · Europe

A three-page paper that started quantum physics

On 19 October 1900 Max Planck read a short paper to the German Physical Society in Berlin, under the modest title ‘On an improvement of the Wien spectral equation’. New measurements had shown that the accepted formula for the radiation given off by a hot body went wrong at low frequencies. Planck offered a corrected formula that fitted the data at every wavelength. He had, at that stage, only guessed it. Deriving it forced him to do something he disliked: to assume that energy came in discrete lumps of a fixed size, which he presented to the same society on 14 December 1900. He regarded it as a mathematical trick and spent years trying to get rid of it. Those lumps are quanta, and the constant he introduced, h, is now one of the fixed numbers on which the metric system is built.

Source: Max Planck Society: energy in packets - what did Max Planck discover? ↗

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

The 1900s

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

1914

The Menin Gate at Ypres, the memorial to the Commonwealth dead of the Ypres salient who have no known grave.Image: No machine-readable author provided. Redvers assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain

world · Europe

The First Battle of Ypres begins

The fighting around the Flemish town of Ypres that started on 19 October 1914 was the last act of the ‘race to the sea’, in which each side repeatedly tried to get round the other’s northern flank. Neither managed it. By the time the battle ended on 22 November the British had lost more than 54,000 men, the French at least 50,000, the Belgians more than 20,000 and the Germans over 130,000 - and the small professional British army that had gone to France in August had largely ceased to exist. The line that was left ran from the Channel to Switzerland, and it did not move much for another four years.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: First Battle of Ypres ↗

1943

A laboratory assay of streptomycin.Image: Unknown photographer · Public domain

science · Americas

The first drug that cured tuberculosis

On 19 October 1943, in Selman Waksman’s soil microbiology laboratory at Rutgers, a graduate student named Albert Schatz isolated an antibiotic from the bacterium Streptomyces griseus. They called it streptomycin. It was the first drug effective against tuberculosis, which was then still killing more people than almost anything else, and it also worked against plague and several other infections penicillin could not touch. The credit was fought over for decades. The 1944 paper carried three names - Schatz, Elizabeth Bugie and Waksman - but the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Waksman alone. Schatz sued over the patent royalties and was legally recognised as co-discoverer in 1950, though it took Rutgers until 1994 to honour him publicly.

Source: Rutgers University: streptomycin and the legacy of Selman Waksman ↗

1954

Gamal Abdel Nasser, who signed the 1954 agreement for Egypt.Image: Stevan Kragujević · CC BY-SA 3.0

politics · Africa

Britain agrees to leave the Suez Canal zone

On 19 October 1954 Egypt and the United Kingdom signed an agreement in Cairo that replaced the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936 and set a timetable for withdrawing British forces from the Suez Canal base. It was the end, on paper, of seventy-two years of British military presence in Egypt. The last troops left in June 1956. Egyptian nationalists were divided on it: the agreement allowed for British forces to return if the canal zone were attacked, which to some looked like the old arrangement in new clothes. The Muslim Brotherhood attacked it, and an attempt on Nasser’s life that October gave him the occasion to break the movement. Two months after the last British soldier left, Nasser nationalised the canal company, and Britain came back at the end of the year - briefly, and with results nobody in 1954 had planned for.

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Anglo-Egyptian Agreement ↗

1987

The S&P 500 index around the crash of October 1987, charted by the Federal Reserve.Image: Mark Carlson, US Federal Reserve Board of Governors · Public domain

world · Americas

The worst day in the history of the stock market

On Monday 19 October 1987 the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 508 points - 22.6 per cent - in a single session. It is still the largest one-day fall the index has ever recorded, and it wiped out something like 500 billion dollars. Nothing obvious had happened: no war, no bank failure, no default. What there was instead was a new kind of machinery. Portfolio insurance programmes were designed to sell automatically as prices fell, which made prices fall further, which triggered more selling. The panic went round the world in hours: Australia lost more than 40 per cent, New Zealand nearly two-thirds from its peak. The Federal Reserve said publicly that it would supply whatever liquidity was needed, and the American market recovered about 60 per cent of the loss within two sessions. The Dow ended 1987 slightly up on the year.

Source: Federal Reserve History: stock market crash of 1987 ↗

2000 TO TODAY

Modern Day

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

2005

Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003.Image: INA (Iraqi News Agency) · Public domain

politics · Asia

Saddam Hussein goes on trial in Baghdad

The trial of Saddam Hussein, three other senior members of his government and four local Ba’th Party officials opened in Baghdad on 19 October 2005 before the Iraqi High Tribunal. The charge was crimes against humanity, and the case concerned Dujail, a town north of Baghdad where, after an attempt on Saddam’s life in 1982, some 800 people were detained and an unknown number tortured; 148 men and boys were later executed. The trial ended in July 2006 and the verdict came in November: death by hanging for Saddam and two others. Human rights observers who monitored the proceedings judged them seriously flawed.

Source: Human Rights Watch: Judging Dujail - the first trial before the Iraqi High Tribunal ↗

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 19 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 19 October

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

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