21 October

10 weird and wonderful things which happened on 21 October:

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and one of the Lake Poets, was born on this date in 1772. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan.
2. Also born on this date, in 1833, was Alfred Nobel, Swedish industrialist, chemist and inventor of dynamite. With the vast fortune he made from this and his oil field holdings, he founded the Nobel prize to honour the world’s leading scientists, artists and peacemakers. He said, "If I have a thousand ideas and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied."
3. In 2001, Elmer Casellano, 16, of Netcong, New Jersey, was crushed to death when he was pulled into a Pizza dough-mixing machine at Frank's Pizza shop in Newark. His hand or clothing might have snagged on the machine's paddles, but the exact circumstances, including how the machine came to be turned on, were not known.
4. In 1997, Elton John's tribute to Princess Diana was declared the world's biggest-selling single. The Guinness Book of Records said it had overtaken the previous global bestseller, Bing Crosby's White Christmas. Candle in the Wind took just 37 days to beat Crosby's record, which had taken 55 years to achieve.
5. In 1879, a whole breed of jokes was born when Thomas A. Edison successfully demonstrated the first durable and commercially practical electric Light bulb at his laboratory in New Jersey. It lasted 40 hours before burning out.
6. The first modern projection planetarium, Walther Bauersfeld's Zeiss Planetarium, opened at the Deutsches Museum in Munich on this date in 1923.
7. In 1663, John Harlow was fined 50 lbs of Tobacco for missing church in Warwick, Virginia.
8. In 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar, Nelson gave his famous signal, ‘England expects...’ which flew from the HMS Victory. The British won the battle against Napoleon’s combined French and Spanish fleets off Cape Trafalgar, but Nelson was killed. His body was sent home in a barrel of Rum. Neat rum is still known in the Royal Navy as ‘Nelson’s Blood’.
9. In 1966, coal slag slid and engulfed houses, a farm and a school in the Welsh village of Aberfan, killing 116 children and 28 adults. Locals had warned coal board officials and others that the coal slag was unsafe and that there had been signs of a slide before, but these complaints and warnings had been ignored.
10. This date in 1716 was dubbed ‘The Dark Day of October’ in New England. According to a contemporary almanac, it was a day so exceptionally dark that “one could not recognise another four seats away, nor read a word in a psalm book”.

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