#TodayInHistory – October 22

October 22 – Some important events on this day.

362 👉🏼 The temple of Apollo at Daphne, outside of Antioch, is destroyed in a mysterious fire
1633 👉🏼 Battle of Liaoluo Bay: Dutch East India Company defeated by Chinese Ming naval forces in southern Fujian sea
1721 👉🏼 Tsar Peter the Great becomes “All-Russian Imperator”

1797 👉🏼 First parachute jump is made over Paris.
André-Jacques Garnerin made the first documented parachute jump on this day, landing safely after exiting a balloon 3,200ft above a park in Paris.
It is said that he came up with the idea while serving in the French army and spending two years as a prisoner after being captured during hostilities against England. He was confined at a prison in Hungary where the high ramparts mocked the notion of any escape attempt but could have sparked the idea of a parachute in his brain.

1879 👉🏼 Thomas Edison perfects carbonized cotton filament light bulb
1883 👉🏼 New York’s original Metropolitan Opera House has its grand opening with a performance of the opera “Faust”
1884 👉🏼 International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C. adopts Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) worldwide, creating 24 international time zones with longitude zero at the Greenwich meridian
1895 👉🏼 In Paris an express train overruns a buffer stop, crosses more than 30 meters of concourse before plummeting through a window at Gare Montparnasse
1897 👉🏼 World’s first car dealer opens in London
1907 👉🏼 Panic of 1907: A run on Knickerbocker Trust Company stock leads to US wide run on banks

1962 👉🏼 Cuban Missile Crisis: US President John F. Kennedy addresses TV about Russian missile bases in Cuba and imposes a naval blockade on Cuba, beginning the missile crisis.
Of the many heart-stopping incidents in the Cold War, perhaps none was more frightening than the Cuban Missile Crisis. On the morning of October 16, 1962, this photo was one of a set shown to US President John F. Kennedy, confirming that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles in communist Cuba, 90 miles off the coast of Florida.
This kicked off thirteen extraordinary days of tension and brinkmanship between the two rivals. For days the Kennedy cabinet debated in private what to do about the situation, and on October 22, Kennedy went public with the crisis by announcing a ‘quarantine’ of Cuba – a carefully used word, since a blockade would technically be an act of war.
More tense moments passed. Soviet ships attempted to penetrate the blockade but turned back. A US spy plane was shot down over Cuba. Eventually, after a long period of talks, Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev agreed that the Soviets would withdraw the missiles in exchange for a public assurance the US would not invade Cuba, as well as a secret deal that America would remove its missiles in Italy and Turkey.
What most people don’t know is just how close the situation came to nuclear war. During the crisis, the US Navy dropped practice depth charges on a Soviet submarine. Inside the sub, the commanders were unaware if a war had begun. It took three votes to launch a nuclear strike: only one of the three commanders, Vasili Arkhipov, voted not to retaliate with a strike, thereby preventing a nuclear war.

2019 👉🏼 US drug company Biogen claims to have created 1st drug to slow advance of Alzheimer’s disease called aducanumab
2019 👉🏼 Legislation for Northern Ireland legalizing same-sex marriage and abortion comes into effect