On Oct. 21, 1772, poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Ottery St. Mary, England.
In 1797 the Navy frigate Constitution, also known as “Old Ironsides,” was launched in Boston’s harbor.
In 1805 a British fleet commanded by Adm. Horatio Nelson defeated a French-Spanish fleet in the Battle of Trafalgar.
In 1833 Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite who established the Nobel Prizes, was born in Stockholm.
In 1879 Thomas Edison invented a workable electric light at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J.
In 1917 jazz trumpeter and composer Dizzy Gillespie was born in Cheraw, S.C.
In 1945 women in France were allowed to vote for the first time.
In 1959 New York’s Guggenheim Museum, designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, was opened to the public.
In 1964 the movie musical “My Fair Lady,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison, had its world premiere in New York.
In 1976 Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize for literature, the first American honored since John Steinbeck in 1962.
In 1984 film director Francois Truffaut died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France; he was 52.
In 1991 American hostage Jesse Turner was freed by his kidnappers in Lebanon after nearly five years in captivity.
In 2001 Washington postal worker Thomas Morris Jr. died of inhaled anthrax; officials closed two postal facilities and began testing thousands of postal employees.
In 2004, after the Boston Red Sox won the American League championship, college student Victoria Snelgrove was fatally injured when she was shot in the eye by a pepper-spray pellet fired by police trying to control a raucous crowd outside Fenway Park.
