Episodes

Frank Lloyd Wright’s extraordinary Guggenheim building finally flung open its doors on 21st October, 1959, after a gestation period of two decades – during which time both Wright, and Solomon Guggenheim himself, had died. The reaction was mixed. Art critics panned the design, likening it to “a washing machine”, an “inverted oatmeal bowl”, and an […]

Rerun. William Alnutt tipped arsenic into the family sugar bowl on 20th October, 1847 – and five days later, the 12 year-old’s sweet-toothed grandfather, Samuel Nelme, was dead.  It was the second time the deeply troubled Alnutt had attempt to murder to his grandfather, after a failed plot to shoot him with a pistol in

Richard Bacon was sacked from Blue Peter after The News of the World revealed he had taken cocaine; an event which was explained to the show’s young viewers by Lorraine Heggessy, then head of Children’s BBC, on 19th October, 1998. The escapade came to light after Bacon’s best friend sold the story via Max Clifford;

The East Java Ninja Scare – an outbreak of mass hysteria in East Java, Indonesia that led to hundreds of deaths – reached its peak with a massacre of suspected ‘sorcerers’ on 18th October, 1998. Essentially a witch-hunt in which vulnerable misfits were targeted for slaughter by superstitious vigilante mobs, the violence nonetheless had its

The London Beer Flood, which created a 15ft-high wave of booze, and claimed the lives of eight people, began on 17th October, 1814 – when an iron hoop came loose on a giant barrel at Meux’s famous Horse Shoe Brewery. The barrel, in which over a million pints of fermenting porter were brewing, exploded –

Henry Blair, the only inventor ever denoted as a ‘colored man’ in the records of US Patent Office, received a patent for his invention of a mechanical corn planter on 14th October, 1834. For decades, it was believed this was the first example of an African-American inventor receiving a US patent. The truth turns out

Rerun. The first ever U.S. officer to be convicted of treason, Army Lieutenant Martin J. Monti Jr., defected from the Air Service to the Nazis on 13th October, 1944. After a stint in radio propaganda, he joined the Waffen-SS, was recaptured by the Americans, and then claimed to be a prisoner of War. His family

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ opened at New York’s Mark Hellinger Theater on 12th October, 1971. The Guardian summarized the show as “the work of two young Englishmen, from an original story by God.” The production was the first to be mounted in a traditional venue – but was far from

The Second Vatican Council – a conference of senior Catholics that transformed the way Mass is given in Churches around the world – began on 11th October, 1962.  The incentive of Pope John XXIII, who had been elected in his late seventies partly under the presumption that he would not do anything particularly radical, the

Scent-o-Vision, an in-cinema olfactory experience, was unveiled at the New York World’s Fair on 10th October, 1940. Accompanying a short film ‘My Dream’, its Swiss inventor, Hans Laube, pumped in aromas of rose water, peaches and burning incense for his wowed attendees to sniff. But it would be two decades before the technology was finally