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October 24 in History

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The Armchair on Pad Forty-One

October 24, 1960

The Armchair on Pad Forty-One

On an autumn evening in nineteen sixty, the Soviet military commander of strategic rocketry dragged a chair to within forty paces of a ticking intercontinental missile. What unfolded in the next half hour became the deadliest ground catastrophe in the history of space flight, erased by the Kremlin for almost thirty years.

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Also on this day

More that happened on October 24

Pick any event and Historai will make it an episode.

  1. 1648The signing of the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to the devastating Thirty Years' War across Europe.
  2. 1795The monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Russia agreed to the Third Partition of Poland, extinguishing the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
  3. 1861Western Union linked its lines in Salt Lake City, completing the first transcontinental telegraph service across North America.
  4. 1901Schoolteacher Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to plunge over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel and survive.
  5. 1917Austro-Hungarian and German armies launched an offensive at Caporetto, shattering the Italian front lines during World War I.
  6. 1929Panic hit the New York Stock Exchange on Black Thursday, unleashing the catastrophic crash that initiated the Great Depression.
  7. 1938The Fair Labor Standards Act took effect across the United States, instituting a federal minimum wage and overtime limits.
  8. 1945The United Nations officially came into existence after a majority of signatory nations ratified the organization's founding charter.
  9. 1970The National Congress of Chile confirmed the election of socialist physician Salvador Allende as the country's new president.
  10. 1973A United Nations ceasefire took full effect, ending combat operations between Israeli, Egyptian, and Syrian forces in the Middle East.
  11. 2003The supersonic Concorde airliner touched down in London after its final commercial passenger flight across the Atlantic from New York.

Chosen from the October 24 pages of HISTORY, HistoryNet and OnThisDay.com, retold in our own words.