Daily Calendar for Wednesday, October 21, 2026

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Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Born

  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poet)
  • Alfred Bernhard Nobel (inventor)
  • Dizzy Gillespie (musician)
  • Edward "Whitey" Ford (baseball player)
  • Ursula K. Le Guin (author)
  • Manfred Mann (musician)
  • Dr. Ronald McNair (astronaut)
  • Carrie Fisher (actress)
  • Douglas G. Hurley (astronaut)

Died

  • Lord Nelson (British admiral)
  • Jack Kerouac (poet)
  • Fred Berry (actor)

Events

  • U.S.S. Constitution launched, Boston, Massachusetts
  • Lord Horatio Nelson of Great Britain and his men destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar
  • Thomas Edison successfully tested for the first time a carbon-filament incandescent light bulb
  • Columbia ran an advertisement in The Saturday Evening Post for the first two-sided record
  • Margaret Owen set a typing speed record on a manual typewriter of 170 words per minute
  • The Guggenheim Museum of Art, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened in New York City
  • Trimline phone was first placed in service, in Michigan
  • Movie My Fair Lady premiered
  • An international agreement redefined the length of a meter as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458th of a second
  • Native American saint Kateri Tekakwitha canonized

Weather

  • The temperature in Boston, Massachusetts, was 80 degrees F

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