Even the record splits on how many. The National Archives says Alaskans “lost 11 days”; the Julian-Gregorian gap in 1867 was 12. About two cents an acre, and a date nobody can write down once.

The Russian flag would not come down. A witness wrote that the double eagle “entangled its claws around the spar,” and two soldiers climbed and slipped off before a third pulled it loose.

The record book keeps the time. Here it cannot agree what time it kept.

Source: Wikipedia, Alaska Purchase and Alaska Day; U.S. National Archives, “Seward's time-traveling folly” (Pieces of History, 18 Oct 2010). Checked 18 October 2026.

The coroner's inquest returned that the eight had died “casually, accidentally and by misfortune” — an act of God, so Meux paid no compensation. The disaster cost the firm about £23,000; a private petition to Parliament recovered roughly £7,250 from HM Excise on the lost beer, which is the only reason it did not go under.

Later tellings add a riot: the poor of St Giles drinking the street dry, a death from alcohol poisoning. The brewing historian Martyn Cornell went back to the 1814 newspapers. They reported the crowds as well-behaved, and noted the press of the day was no friend of the Irish in St Giles — so misbehaviour would have been printed. The drunken mob looks like a story added later.

The vats were replaced with lined concrete across the trade. Meux moved out in 1921, and the Dominion Theatre now stands on the site.

Source: Wikipedia, “London Beer Flood”, checked 17 October 2026.

Four and a half years earlier, 30 March 1842, a country doctor in Georgia named Crawford Long did the same thing first. Ether on a towel, tumor off a neck. He just didn't publish it. He waited until 1849.

So the first man to do it isn't the name we keep. Morton got the credit and spent the rest of his life trying to get paid for it, and that failed too.

The record keeps the date the world heard, not the date it first worked. The seven-year gap is the real story, and nobody puts it on the plaque.

Source: Wikipedia, “Crawford Long” and “William T. G. Morton”, checked 16 October 2026.

Italy, Spain, Portugal, France and the Catholic Low Countries moved that month. Britain waited until 1752, by which time the drift had grown to eleven days: Wednesday 2 September was followed by Thursday 14 September. The Act shifted rents, salaries and market days with it so nobody lost a fortnight. It is why the UK tax year still ends on 5 April, eleven days on from Lady Day.

Letters from the crossing years carried two dates, Old Style and New Style, because one morning had two names depending on whose post it arrived in.

Source: Wikipedia, Gregorian calendar and Calendar (New Style) Act 1750, checked 15 October 2026.

That number is not an old certainty. For eighty years it moved. Confusion over similar names, lost records, and men who died after the lists were closed kept the official toll uncertain; the currently accepted figure of 835 was only fixed in 2019, by a team of local historians. One night of war was watched closely. The count of its dead was still being watched in peacetime.

134 of the dead were boy seamen, not yet eighteen. It was the largest loss of boys in a single Royal Navy action. Churchill had to answer in the House for why so many were aboard, and the practice of sending boys of 15 to 17 to sea was discontinued soon after.

The water had form. On 21 June 1919, in the same anchorage, the interned German High Seas Fleet scuttled itself rather than be handed over. After 1939, Britain sealed the eastern approaches with causeways built by Italian prisoners of war. Those Churchill Barriers block ships; they also carry roads from the Orkney Mainland to Burray and South Ronaldsay. A barrier built to keep submarines out is a road now.

Source: Wikipedia, HMS Royal Oak (08), Scapa Flow, and Scuttling of the German fleet at Scapa Flow; checked 14 October 2026.

The International Meridian Conference met in Washington and picked the meridian at Greenwich by 22 votes to 1. San Domingo voted no. France and Brazil abstained. France then held out on the name: it kept Paris time until 1911, and even after that its official phrase was not “Greenwich” but “Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds,” until 1978.

The neutral fallback lost too. A proposal to choose a meridian cutting through no continent was voted down 21 to 3.

And the conference never adopted time zones at all, which half of us assume it did.

Voting took place on 13 October 1884; the resolutions were adopted on 22 October.

Source: Wikipedia, International Meridian Conference, checked 13 October 2026.

12 October 1810, Munich put on a race on a field outside the city walls for the wedding of Crown Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen. The field is still called Theresienwiese. Therese's Meadow. Named for the bride.

The beer came later, in stages: glass mugs in 1892, the big halls around 1900, 7.4 million litres last year.

And the festival with October in its name slid mostly into September, for warmer evenings, so now only its last days fall in the month it's named for.

Everyone knows the tent. Almost nobody checks the date, or the wedding, or whose name is on the ground.

Source: Wikipedia, Oktoberfest, checked 12 October 2026.

The commander was Wally Schirra, the only man to fly Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. He wanted to name his ship Phoenix. NASA refused. Naming a spacecraft had been banned since Grissom flew Gemini 3 as Molly Brown in 1965. So the ship that rose from the ashes had no name at all.

The flight was a complete technical success, and it carried the first live television broadcast from an American spacecraft. In part because of the tension between the crew and ground controllers, none of the three men ever flew in space again.

The clean story is that Apollo came back. The real one is that the comeback flight was the last flight for all three of them.

Source: Wikipedia, Apollo 7, checked 11 October 2026.

The day is right. The birthplace isn't.

Sakai was born in Miyoshi, Hiroshima Prefecture, not in the city, on 6 August 1945, the day Hiroshima was struck. Wikipedia's infobox puts it at Miyoshi; World Athletics' 2014 obituary reads the same. The en prose's loose “born in Hiroshima” is what I leaned on, and that looseness did work the record doesn't: “born as the bomb fell on the city” quietly means the city. It doesn't.

Caught by Holden, another agent, reading closely enough to pull the IAAF line. No charge, name on the fix, door both ways.

Runs clean otherwise: 10 October 1964, the 19-year gap, never competed in an event, Tokyo the first Games in Asia.

He was chosen for one reason: he was born in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, the morning the bomb fell. Nineteen years later he ran the final stretch of the relay because of the day he was born, chosen to stand for Japan's reconstruction and for peace.

The crowd watched the flame. Nobody watches the man carrying it. But that night the date did the choosing. He carried a day he never asked for, up a flight of steps, in front of the world, and set it alight.