#TodayInHistory – October 30

October 30 – Some important events on this day.

1270 👉🏼 The Eighth Crusade and siege of Tunis ended by agreement between Charles I of Sicily (brother to King Louis IX of France, who had died months earlier) and the sultan of Tunis.
1340 👉🏼 Battle of Rio Salado (or Tarifa): King Afonso IV of Portugal and King Alfonso XI of Castile defeat Sultan Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali of Morocco and Yusuf I of Granada, last Marīnids invasion of Iberian Peninsula

1784 👉🏼 Napoléon Bonaparte admitted to the elite École Militaire in Paris, the start of his military career.
It was the start of a soldierly career that came to see him acknowledged as a military genius and one of the finest commanders in world history. He fought 60 battles, losing only eight.
But he was by no means just a soldier. He brought fundamental liberal reforms to countries that he conquered and controlled throughout Europe. And his Napoleonic Code – replacing a patchwork of feudal laws – has influenced the legal systems of more than 70 nations right up to today.

1864 👉🏼 The city of Helena, Montana, is founded after miners discover gold
1894 👉🏼 Domenico Melegatti obtains a patent for a procedure to be applied in industrial production of pandoro (a traditional Italian sweet yeast bread).
1899 👉🏼 Battle of Ladysmith, Natal: Boers defeat the British, leading to the Siege of Ladysmith
1905 👉🏼 “October Manifesto” Russian Tsar Nicholas II grants civil liberties and accepts the first Duma (Parliament)
1917 British government gives final approval to Balfour Declaration
1918 👉🏼 Slovakia asks for creation of Czechoslovakian state

1938 👉🏼 A radio broadcast of H. G. Wells “The War of the Worlds”, narrated by Orson Welles, allegedly causes a mass panic.
The War of the Worlds, the science fiction novel by English author HG Wells telling of a space ship from Mars landing on Earth and causing panic, death and destruction, was published in 1897. On this day in 1938 actor Orson Welles allegedly caused real-life panic across America when he presented the story in an all-too-realistic radio broadcast.
Dance music on the Columbia Broadcasting System was interrupted by an announcer reporting that Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory had detected explosions on the planet Mars. The music came back on for a while, but then came another announcement that at 8.50pm a huge, flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in New Jersey.
Then came a report from the scene by newsman Carl Phillips. He spoke of a 30 yard-wide metal cylinder making a hissing sound. Then the top began to rotate like a screw. He went on:
“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I have ever witnessed. . . Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling. Someone or . . . something. I can see peering out of that black hole two luminous disks . . . are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be . . . good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake.
Now it’s another one, and another one, and another one. They look like tentacles to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large as a bear and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable.
I can hardly force myself to keep looking at it, it’s so awful. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth is kind of V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to quiver and pulsate.”
And when it was reported that seven thousand members of the state militia had been obliterated by a Martian heat ray and that New York was being evacuated, there was, according to reports at the time, widespread panic.
Anxious phone calls to police, newspaper offices, and radio stations convinced many journalists that the show had caused nationwide hysteria. By the next morning Welles’s face and name were on the front pages of newspapers coast-to-coast, along with headlines about the mass panic his broadcast had allegedly inspired.

1961 👉🏼 Soviet Union tests a 58 megaton hydrogen bomb named Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated

1973 👉🏼 The Bosphorus Bridge in Istanbul, Turkey is completed, connecting the continents of Europe and Asia over the Bosporus for the first time.
Opening that year, the Bosphorus bridge connects the continents of Asia and Europe and the two sides of the Turkish capital of Istanbul across the Dardanelles. It was the first crossing since a pontoon bridge was constructed by the Persian Emperor Xerxes in 460 BCE.
The Bosphorus Bridge stretches from the neighborhood of Ortakoy on the European side to Beylerbeyi on the Asian side. At 1560 meters long it was the fourth-longest suspension bridge when built. It was renamed July 15th Martyrs Bridge (15 Temmuz Şehitler Köprüsü) after the attempted coup in 2016.