On Oct. 11, 1811, the first steam ferry was put into operation between New York City and Hoboken, N.J., by inventor John Stevens.
In 1868 Thomas A. Edison filed papers for his first invention, an electrical voice recorder to speed the tabulation of votes in Congress.
In 1899, at age 24, Winston Churchill, Britain’s future prime minister, sailed to South Africa to cover the Boer War as chief correspondent for the London Morning Post.
In 1932 the Democratic National Committee sponsored a television program from New York. It was the nation’s first political telecast.
In 1958 the lunar probe Pioneer 1 was launched. Failing to travel as far as planned, it fell back toward Earth and burned up in the atmosphere.
In 1967 Bolivian officials said the body of slain Cuban guerrilla leader Che Guevara had been buried in a secret remote grave. (It was not until the summer of 1997 that the body was found, dug up and ceremoniously reburied in Cuba.)
In 1968 Apollo 7, the first manned mission of the Apollo series, was launched with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham.
In 1975 “Saturday Night Live” premiered on NBC with comic George Carlin as guest host.
In 1979 Cuban President Fidel Castro paid his first visit to New York in 19 years. (He would address the United Nations.)
In 1984 space shuttle astronaut Kathy Sullivan became the first American woman to perform a spacewalk.
In 1991 comedian Redd Foxx died in Los Angeles; he was 68.
In 1994 American troops, sent to Haiti to end three years of military rule there and place democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in office, took over the National Palace in Port-au-Prince.
In 1998 Pope John Paul II decreed the first Jewish-born saint of the modern era: Edith Stein, a nun who had died in a gas chamber at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.
In 2002 former President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2005 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it had finished pumping out the New Orleans metropolitan area, which was flooded by Hurricane Katrina six weeks earlier and then was swamped again by Hurricane Rita.
