On this day: October 1
Thomas Edison opens the world's first electric lamp factory, Yosemite becomes a national park, soccer great Pele says goodbye, and Walt Disney World opens, all on this day.
1553: Queen Mary I of England is crowned at Westminster Abbey in London. During her five-year reign, she has more than 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake, earning the name "Bloody Mary."
1553: Queen Mary I of England is crowned at Westminster Abbey in London. During her five-year reign, she has more than 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake, earning the name "Bloody Mary."
1880: Thomas Edison opens the first electric lamp factory, in Menlo Park, N.J.
1881: Engineer William Boeing, an aviation pioneer who founded The Boeing Company, is born in Detroit, Mich.
1890: Yosemite National Park is established by the U.S. Congress.
1903: The Pittsburgh Pirates beat Cy Young and the Boston Americans 7-3 at the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds in Boston in the first game of the modern World Series. Pirates pitcher Deacon Phillippe sets a World Series record by striking out 10 Boston batters. That record lasts barely one day, as Boston's Bill Dinneen strikes out 11 Pittsburgh batters in Game 2. Boston would eventually win the best-of-nine series five games to three.
1908: Ford puts the Model T car on the market at a price starting at $850.
1910: A large bomb destroys the Los Angeles Times building in downtown Los Angeles, killing 21 and injuring more than 100. The bomb was set by a union member belonging to the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers as a response to Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, who was vehemently anti-union. The bomb, 16 sticks of dynamite in a suitcase, was intended to go off at 4 a.m. when the building would be empty but the clock timing mechanism was faulty. It instead went off at 1:07 a.m. and ignited natural gas main lines under the building.
1910: Bonnie Parker, who would go on to become one half the famous gangster duo Bonnie & Clyde with Clyde Barrow, is born in Rowena, Texas.
1924: Jimmy Carter, who would go on to become the 39th president of the United States and receive the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, is born in Plains, Ga.
1927: Actor Tom Bosley, known for playing Mr. Cunningham on the sitcom "Happy Days" and as the titular character on the TV drama "Father Dowling Mysteries," is born in Chicago.
1928: Actor George Peppard, known best for his role as Col. John "Hannibal" Smith in the 1980s television show "The A-Team," is born in Detroit, Mich.
1930: Actor and filmmaker Richard Harris, perhaps best known for his role as King Arthur in the 1967 film "Camelot" (pictured) and for playing Albus Dumbledore in the first two films in the "Harry Potter" series, his final works, is born in Limerick, Ireland. His other films included "The Sporting Life" and "The Field," both of which earned him Oscar nominations, "Gladiator," "Unforgiven" and "Cry, the Beloved Country."
1935: Actress and singer Julie Andrews, best known for her debut film role in "Mary Poppins," for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and her role in "The Sound of Music," is born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England.
1939: Winston Churchill coins the phrase "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" while describing Russia during a BBC radio broadcast.
1940: The first segment of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, often considered the first superhighway in the United States, opens to traffic.
1945: Hall of Fame baseball player Rod Carew, who hit for a .328 average and collected 3,053 hits in a 19-season career with the Minnesota Twins and California Angels, is born in Gatún, Panama Canal Zone.
1946: Nazi leaders are sentenced at the Nuremberg Trials. Of the 24 accused in the trials, 12 were sentenced to death, three to life in prison, four to prison terms between 10 and 20 years, and three were acquitted. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, a Nazi industrialist, was found medically unfit for trial and Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, committed suicide before the trial began.
1946: Mensa International, a non-profit organization open to people who score at the 98th percentile or higher on a standardised, supervised IQ or other approved intelligence test, is founded at Lincoln College in Oxford, England.
1947: The F-86 Sabre flies for the first time, taking off from what is now Edwards Air Force Base in California. The jet was the first swept wing fighter that could counter the similarly winged Soviet MiG-15 in high-speed dogfights over the skies of the Korean War.
1950: Actor Randy Quaid ("National Lampoon's Vacation," "Independence Day") is born in Houston, Texas.
1955: The sitcom "The Honeymooners," starring Jackie Gleason, Audrey Meadows, Art Carney and Joyce Randolph, debuts on television. The show would turn out to be a ratings success initially, becoming the No. 2 show in America at one point, its ratings fell over the course of the season it was canceled after only 39 episodes. The last show aired on Sept. 22, 1956.
1958: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is created to replace the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA).
1961: Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit his 61st home run of the season, breaking Babe Ruth's record of 60 set in 1927. The record would stand until Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals hits 70 home runs in the 1998 season.
1962: After being barred from entering on Sept. 20, James Meredith becomes the first black student at the University of Mississippi.
1962: The sitcom "The Lucy Show" premieres. The show, which was Lucille Ball's follow-up to "I Love Lucy," would win Ball consecutive Emmys during the series' final two seasons in 1966-67 and 1967-68.
1962: The late-night talk show "The Tonight Show" broadcasts for the first time with Jonny Carson as its host. Carson would prove to be the longest serving host for the show, lasting 30 seasons until he retired on May 22, 1992.
1963: Baseball player Mark McGwire, who broke Roger Maris' single-season home run record of 61 when he hit 70 during the 1998 season, is born in Pomona, Calif.
1964: Japanese "bullet trains," or Shinkansen, begin high-speed rail service from Tokyo to Osaka.
1964: San Francisco cable cars are declared a national landmark. The cable cars are the only mobile national monument in the world.
1968: The zombie movie "Night of the Living Dead," directed by first-time film director George A. Romero and starring Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea and Karl Hardman, premieres at the Fulton Theater in Pittsburgh.
1969: The Concorde breaks the sound barrier for the first time, flying faster than the speed of sound for nine minutes during a test flight in France.
1969: Actor and comedian Zach Galifianakis ("The Hangover," "The Campaign") is born in Wilkesboro, N.C.
1971: Walt Disney World opens near Orlando, Fla. The park originally opened with only the Magic Kingdom theme park along with two hotels and a campground resort, but has since added three more theme parks, more hotels, water parks and other attractions.
1971: The first brain-scan using X-ray computed tomography (CT or CAT scan) is performed at Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon, London.
1974: The slasher film "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre," directed and produced by Tobe Hooper, premieres in Austin, Texas. The low-budget film, which follows a group of friends who fall victim to a family of cannibals while on their way to visit an old homestead, proved to be enormously successful, grossing more than $30 million at the domestic box office.
1975: Muhammad Ali defeats Joe Frazier in a boxing match in Manila, Philippines, that is known as "The Thrilla in Manila." While the fight started at 10:45 a.m. Manila time on Oct. 1, as this poster shows, the fight was actually seen the night of Sept. 30, 1975, in the United States and much of the rest of the world, given the time difference.
1977: Brazilian soccer great Pele retires following an exhibition match between the New York Cosmos and his former team, the Santos Futebol Clube, at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Pele played the first half of the game for the Cosmos and the second half for Santos. He retired with 1,281 goals in 1,363 games.
1982: EPCOT Center opens at Walt Disney World in Florida. The theme park, stemming from the conceptual Utopian city of the future Walt Disney had wanted to build at Disney World, was designed as a model city of tomorrow, with its name standing for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.
1982: Sony launches the first consumer compact disc player (model CDP-101).
1985: Author E. B. White ("The Trumpet of the Swan," "Charlotte's Web," "Stuart Little") dies from Alzheimer's disease at the age of 86 at his farm home in North Brooklin, Maine.
1989: Denmark introduces the world's first legal modern same-sex civil union called "registered partnership."
1992: The cable channel Cartoon Network is launched. The initial programming on the channel consists exclusively of reruns of classic Warner Bros cartoons, the 1933–1957 Popeye cartoons, MGM cartoons and Hanna-Barbera cartoons.
1992: After announcing on July 16 that he would pull out of the presidential race as an independent candidate, Ross Perot re-enters the race. In announcing his intention to re-enter the race, Perot said the reason he had dropped out was because Republican operatives had wanted to reveal digitally altered compromising photographs of his daughter, which would disrupt her wedding, and he wanted to spare her from embarrassment. Perot would end up garnering 18.9 percent of the popular vote, approximately 19.7 million votes, making him the most successful third-party presidential candidate in terms of the popular vote since Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election.
1993: Polly Klaas, 12, is abducted from her Petaluma, Calif., home during a slumber party and murdered. Repeat criminal offender Richard Allen Davis would eventually be convicted in her death. Davis' criminal record, which included multiple burglary convictions and two kidnapping convictions, one of which he was paroled from about three months before abducting Klass, fueled support for passage of California's "three strikes law" for repeat offenders.
1994: The National Hockey League team owners begin a lockout of the players that would end up lasting 103 days.
1995: The New York Yankees win the first postseason wild card berth in MLB history. The Yankees would end up losing their Division Series to the Seattle Mariners three games to two. The wild card rule was originally intended to go into effect for the 1994 playoffs, which were canceled because of the players' strike.
2005: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist dies from thyroid cancer at his Arlington, Va., home at the age of 80.
2008: Searchers find the wreckage of millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett's plane more than a year after he disappeared on a solo flight over California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Fossett is seen here in a 2002 file photo.
2009: "Late Show" host David Letterman acknowledges on-air during a taping of the show that he had sexual relationships with some female staffers after former CBS producer is charged in a blackmail plot.
2010: "The Social Network," starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and Justin Timberlake and directed by David Fincher premieres in theaters. The movie, film portrays Mark Zuckerberg's founding of Facebook and the resulting lawsuits, would receive widespread acclaim and eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, but won only for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Film Editing. However, the film would win Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Original Score.
