TITLE: October 17: Surrenders, Beer Floods, and Shaking Ground
October 17 is an odd date in history. It has seen a surrender that changed a revolution, a flood of beer, a gangster brought down by his accountants and an earthquake broadcast live to the nation. Here are seven of the most remarkable things that happened on this day.
1. 1777 - Burgoyne Surrenders at Saratoga
In the summer of 1777, British General John "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne marched south from Canada. His plan was to cut New England off from the rest of the rebelling colonies by taking control of the Hudson River valley. The campaign went badly. His supply lines grew too long, the support he expected from other British forces never arrived and the American army around him kept growing. After two hard-fought battles near Saratoga, including Benedict Arnold's charge at Bemis Heights on October 7, Burgoyne was surrounded. On October 17 he surrendered about 5,800 men to General Horatio Gates. The effects reached far beyond the battlefield. Benjamin Franklin had spent months in Paris trying to persuade France to openly join the war. Saratoga showed that the Americans could defeat a professional British army in the field. Within a few months France signed a Treaty of Alliance with the United States, bringing French money, warships and soldiers into the war. Without that help, the final victory at Yorktown four years later is hard to imagine. The surrender has a small ironic footnote. The terms, called the "Convention of Saratoga," allowed Burgoyne's troops to sail home if they promised never to fight in America again. Congress, worried they would simply replace other British soldiers elsewhere, found reasons to delay. The "Convention Army" spent years marching between prison camps in Massachusetts and Virginia, and many of its men never went home at all.
2. 1814 - The London Beer Flood
On the afternoon of October 17, 1814, at the Meux and Company Horse Shoe Brewery near Tottenham Court Road, one of the iron hoops around a huge wooden vat of porter snapped. About an hour later the vat burst. The rush of liquid broke open other vats, and more than a million litres of beer poured into the streets of St Giles, one of London's poorest and most crowded slums. The wave knocked down walls and flooded basements where whole families lived. Eight people died, most of them women and children, including mourners at a wake for a small boy who had died the day before. Later stories describe crowds scooping up the free beer and even dying of alcohol poisoning, but historians treat those accounts with caution. Newspapers at the time described a grim scene of rescue, not a party. At the inquest the jury decided the deaths were caused "by casualty, by accident, and by misfortune," which amounted to an act of God. The brewery was not held responsible, and it even received a refund of the excise tax it had paid on the lost beer. Breweries gradually moved away from wooden vats toward lined concrete ones. The disaster is still one of the strangest industrial accidents in British history.
3. 1931 - Al Capone Convicted of Tax Evasion
By 1931 Al Capone was the most famous criminal in America. He ran a Chicago bootlegging, gambling and prostitution empire and was widely believed to be behind the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Yet for years no one could convict him of anything serious. Witnesses kept quiet, juries could be intimidated and officials could be bought. The federal government found a different approach. Treasury agents led by Frank Wilson of the IRS Special Intelligence Unit, working alongside Eliot Ness's Prohibition team, focused on the money. Capone had never filed an income tax return, and a 1927 Supreme Court ruling had confirmed that even illegal income was taxable. Investigators worked through ledgers and bank records and found witnesses who could link Capone to his earnings. On October 17, 1931, a jury convicted him of tax evasion. A week later he was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Capone served time in Atlanta and then in the new federal prison on Alcatraz Island. By then he was seriously ill with syphilis that had gone untreated, and he was released in 1939 a shadow of his former self. His case became the classic example of "following the money," and prosecutors still use the same strategy against organized crime, drug cartels and corrupt officials.
4. 1933 - Albert Einstein Arrives in America
When Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, Albert Einstein was visiting the United States. He was Jewish, a pacifist and the world's most famous scientist, which made him an obvious target for the Nazis. They seized his property and burned his books. Einstein gave up his German citizenship and spent several uneasy months in Belgium and England, where he was reportedly guarded against assassination. On October 17, 1933, he arrived in the United States to take up a position at the newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. To avoid the expected crowds and reporters, he was taken off his ocean liner by tugboat and driven quietly to Princeton. He lived there for the rest of his life, became an American citizen in 1940 and never set foot in Germany again. His arrival symbolized a huge intellectual migration. Over the next decade, many of Europe's best scientists, mathematicians and artists escaped fascism and came to America and Britain, and the center of world science shifted with them. In 1939, Einstein signed the famous letter warning President Franklin Roosevelt that Germany might build an atomic bomb, which helped lead to the Manhattan Project. He later called signing it one of his great regrets.
5. 1956 - Calder Hall, the First Commercial-Scale Nuclear Power Station
On October 17, 1956, Queen Elizabeth II pulled a lever at Calder Hall in Cumbria, in northwest England, and nuclear-generated electricity began flowing into Britain's national grid. A small Soviet reactor at Obninsk had produced grid power two years earlier. Calder Hall, however, was the first nuclear station to supply electricity on an industrial scale, and it became the model for a new kind of power plant. The opening was presented as "atoms for peace," but the reality was more complicated. Calder Hall's reactors were designed to produce plutonium for Britain's nuclear weapons program, and electricity was partly a by-product. The station sat beside the Windscale site, where a serious reactor fire would break out just a year later, in October 1957. It was one of the first major nuclear accidents. Even so, Calder Hall worked remarkably well. It produced electricity for 47 years before it closed in 2003, and it was demolished in 2007. The plant began an industry that now supplies about a tenth of the world's electricity. Nuclear power is also being reconsidered today as a low-carbon energy source.
6. 1973 - The Arab Oil Embargo Begins
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur. When the United States began airlifting military supplies to Israel, the Arab oil-producing nations responded with an economic weapon. On October 17, members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) announced monthly production cuts. Soon afterward they placed a full embargo on oil shipments to the United States and several other countries. The effects were dramatic. The price of oil rose from about $3 a barrel to nearly $12 by early 1974. Americans saw long lines at gas stations, rationing by odd and even license plates, and closed stations hanging "Sorry, No Gas" signs. The economy, already weakened by inflation, fell into a deep recession. For the first time, many Americans realized how much their way of life depended on imported oil. The embargo ended in March 1974, but its effects have lasted for decades. It led to the national 55 mph speed limit, fuel-economy standards for cars, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the creation of the Department of Energy. It also made small, fuel-efficient Japanese cars popular in the United States, which reshaped the global auto industry. Arguments about energy independence still go back to October 17, 1973.
7. 1989 - The Loma Prieta Earthquake Shakes the World Series
At 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, about 62 million people were tuned in for Game 3 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics. As ABC's broadcast from Candlestick Park began, the picture shook and then cut out. Announcer Al Michaels was heard saying, "I'll tell you what — we're having an earth—" before the feed went dead. It was the first major earthquake ever broadcast live on national television. The magnitude 6.9 earthquake was centered near Loma Prieta peak in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and it caused severe damage across the Bay Area. In Oakland, the upper deck of the Cypress Street Viaduct collapsed onto the lower deck, killing 42 people. A section of the Bay Bridge's upper deck fell onto the level below. Buildings in San Francisco's Marina District, built on loose landfill, caught fire and collapsed. In all, 63 people died and thousands were injured. The death toll could have been much higher. Because so many people had left work early or stayed home to watch the all-Bay Area World Series, rush-hour traffic was unusually light. The disaster changed earthquake engineering in California. The state spent billions retrofitting bridges and freeways, San Francisco tore down its damaged Embarcadero Freeway and reopened its waterfront, and the Bay Bridge's eastern span was eventually replaced. The World Series resumed ten days later, and Oakland completed a sweep that hardly anyone remembers.
Reflection: The Threads That Bind Us
On the surface, these seven events have little in common. They include a surrender in a colonial forest, a wave of beer in a London slum, a courtroom in Chicago, a refugee scientist, a power plant, an oil embargo and an earthquake. Together, though, they show how history usually unfolds. Small decisions have huge consequences, like a French king's choice after Saratoga or a tax agent's patient work through ledgers. Disasters lead to reform, as the Beer Flood, the oil embargo and Loma Prieta all did. The movement of a single person can shift the center of a whole field of knowledge, as Einstein's did. We live with the results of these days without noticing. The bridges we drive across were rebuilt with Loma Prieta's lessons, the cars we buy reflect the gas lines of 1973 and the electricity in our walls may come from descendants of Calder Hall. Every October 17 carries the echoes of all the October 17s before it.