TITLE: October 4: Satellites, Saints, and Stone Giants
October 4 has seen a lot happen. On this date ten days were taken out of the calendar, granite faces began to appear on a mountain, and a small metal sphere started the Space Age. Here are seven moments that made this an unusually eventful day.
1. 1535 - The First Complete English Bible
On October 4, 1535, Myles Coverdale finished printing the first complete Bible translated into modern English. Making that book was dangerous. Only a year later, William Tyndale, whose English New Testament Coverdale drew on heavily, was arrested and later executed for heresy. Coverdale worked mostly in exile on the Continent. He put together his translation from the Latin Vulgate, Martin Luther's German Bible and Tyndale's earlier work. The Coverdale Bible came out at a turning point. Henry VIII had just broken with Rome, and the political mood in England was changing fast. Within a few years an English Bible was ordered placed in every parish church, which would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. Coverdale's prose had a long life. His translation of the Psalms was adopted into the Book of Common Prayer, and congregations still sing and recite it today. Phrases such as "the valley of the shadow of death" reached the English language partly through his work.
2. 1582 - The Day Ten Days Disappeared
People in Rome who went to bed on Thursday, October 4, 1582 woke up on Friday, October 15. This was not a mistake. It was the start of the Gregorian calendar. The old Julian calendar, in use since Julius Caesar, assumed the year was 365.25 days long. The true solar year is about 11 minutes shorter. Over 16 centuries that small error added up to about ten days, and the spring equinox, which Easter's date depends on, had drifted badly. Pope Gregory XIII fixed the problem with a papal bull called Inter gravissimas. It removed ten days in one step and changed the leap year rule: century years are leap years only if they divide evenly by 400. That is why 2000 was a leap year and 1900 was not. Italy, Spain, Portugal and Poland switched right away. Protestant and Orthodox countries held out for a long time. Britain and its American colonies did not change until 1752, Russia until 1918 and Greece until 1923. One historical oddity: St. Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish mystic, died on the night of the changeover. Her feast day is October 15, the morning after October 4.
3. 1883 - The Orient Express Leaves the Station
On the evening of October 4, 1883, a train left Paris's Gare de l'Est on its first run east. Belgian entrepreneur Georges Nagelmackers wanted to bring American-style sleeping cars to Europe, but with far more luxury. His Orient Express had wood-paneled carriages, fine dining, silk sheets and attentive staff, and it carried passengers across a continent. The first trip was not a straight run. Passengers rode the train to Giurgiu in Romania, crossed the Danube by ferry, took another train to the Black Sea port of Varna, and finished the trip to Constantinople by steamer. A through rail line to Constantinople was not completed until 1889. Even with the transfers, the trip was a sensation, and it linked Western Europe with the edge of Asia as never before. The train's name came to mean glamour and mystery. Spies, diplomats, royalty and celebrities rode it, and Agatha Christie made it famous for good with Murder on the Orient Express in 1934. Most of the original service ended long ago, but the name still means something.
4. 1927 - Carving Begins on Mount Rushmore
On October 4, 1927, sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his crew began carving into a granite peak in South Dakota's Black Hills. The work was meant to draw tourists to the region. The project ran for 14 years and employed about 400 workers. Most of them were local miners and laborers, not trained sculptors. The methods were mainly industrial. About 90% of the 450,000 tons of rock removed was blasted off with dynamite. Workers hung from the cliff face in harnesses and finished the details with jackhammers and hand tools. No worker died during construction, which is remarkable for such dangerous work. Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln each have a face about 60 feet tall. Borglum died in March 1941, months before the work ended, and his son Lincoln Borglum finished the project. The monument also has a contested side: the Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota Sioux and were taken from them in violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie. That history is part of the full story of the monument.
5. 1957 - Sputnik Starts the Space Age
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on an R-7 rocket. It was a polished metal sphere about the size of a beach ball, weighing 184 pounds, with four long antennas. It circled the Earth about every 96 minutes. Its "beep-beep" radio signal could be picked up by amateur radio operators around the world. Many people stood outside at dusk to watch the rocket's core stage cross the sky. The technology was simple, but the shock was enormous. If the Soviets could put a satellite in orbit, they could also send a warhead across an ocean. Americans felt the "Sputnik crisis" in classrooms, Congress and newspapers. Within about a year the United States had created NASA and ARPA, the agency later called DARPA whose work led to the internet. Congress also passed the National Defense Education Act, which sent large sums into science and math teaching. Sputnik's batteries ran out after 21 days, and the satellite burned up on reentry in January 1958. It still changed the century. Its launch led to the Moon landings, GPS, weather satellites and the communications network the modern world depends on.
6. 1965 - A Pope Comes to the New World
On October 4, 1965, Pope Paul VI landed in New York. He was the first reigning pope ever to set foot in the Western Hemisphere. The date was deliberate: October 4 is the feast of St. Francis of Assisi, the saint most associated with peace. The visit lasted only about 14 hours. He met President Lyndon Johnson, celebrated Mass before about 90,000 people at Yankee Stadium, and drove through crowds that lined the streets of Manhattan. The main event was his address to the United Nations General Assembly, the first by a pope. With the Cold War at its height and the Vietnam War growing, he made a plea in French that became famous: "Jamais plus la guerre, jamais plus la guerre!" ("No more war, war never again!"). He called the UN humanity's "last hope for concord and peace." The visit changed what a modern papacy could look like. Popes had long been seen as remote figures in Rome. Paul VI showed that a pope could travel the world as a pastor and diplomat, and every pope since has followed his example.
7. 2004 - SpaceShipOne Wins the X Prize
On October 4, 2004, the 47th anniversary of Sputnik, pilot Brian Binnie flew SpaceShipOne to an altitude of about 69.6 miles (112 km), well past the 62-mile line generally accepted as the edge of space. Mike Melvill had flown the same craft past that line only five days earlier. Two crewed flights to space within two weeks met the conditions of the $10 million Ansari X Prize, which had been set up to prove that private companies could reach space. Designer Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, built SpaceShipOne. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen paid for it. The craft used a "feathering" design: the tail section tilted upward during reentry, so the vehicle slowed itself and stayed stable, like a badminton shuttlecock. The whole program cost about $25 million, a tiny sum compared with government space programs. The flight showed that the commercial space industry was real. Richard Branson licensed the technology for Virgin Galactic. The success also encouraged investors and engineers behind the private launch boom that followed. Today SpaceShipOne hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, not far from the Spirit of St. Louis, and the timing of its anniversary flight was not an accident.
Reflection: The Threads That Bind Us
These seven events cover nearly 500 years, and they are linked. Coverdale's Bible and Pope Paul VI's UN speech are both about words carrying meaning across borders. The Gregorian calendar and Sputnik both depended on careful astronomy, one fixing a slow drift in the calendar and the other putting a new object in the sky. The Orient Express, Mount Rushmore and SpaceShipOne all came from people deciding to attempt something that looked impractical: crossing a continent in comfort, carving a mountain, reaching space without a government. SpaceShipOne's crew flew on Sputnik's anniversary on purpose. People making history usually know about the people who came before them and build on their work. Our calendars still follow Pope Gregory's rules, and this article reaches you over a network that exists partly because of Sputnik.