TITLE: October 22: Parachutes, Prophecy, and Venus
October 22 has seen a daredevil fall from the Paris sky, a frontier republic choose its first president, and humanity's first look at the ground of another world. Here are seven moments from this date that changed how we learn, travel, govern, copy, survive, and explore.
1. 1746 – Princeton Is Born as the College of New Jersey
On October 22, 1746, the acting governor of New Jersey, John Hamilton, granted a charter to a new school called the College of New Jersey. Only Harvard, William & Mary, and Yale were older in colonial America. The college was founded by "New Light" Presbyterians from the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, and its purpose was to train ministers and educated leaders. Its first classes met in 1747 in the Elizabeth home of its first president, Jonathan Dickinson. The college moved around in its early years. It went from Elizabeth to Newark and finally settled in the village of Princeton in 1756, where Nassau Hall was built. At the time it was one of the largest buildings in the colonies. During the Revolution, Nassau Hall was occupied by British and then American troops, and in 1783 it briefly served as the capital of the United States while the Continental Congress met there. The school officially became Princeton University in 1896. Its alumni include two U.S. presidents (James Madison and Woodrow Wilson), many Supreme Court justices, and a long list of scientists and writers. The charter signed on October 22 helped establish a tradition of American higher education.
2. 1797 – The First Parachute Jump
On October 22, 1797, a crowd at the Parc Monceau in Paris watched French aeronaut André-Jacques Garnerin rise beneath a hydrogen balloon. He rode in a small basket hung below a closed silk parachute. At roughly 3,000 feet he cut the cord and dropped away from the balloon. The parachute opened and he started down. The descent was frightening. Garnerin's canopy had no vent at the top, so trapped air spilled out unevenly from the sides and the basket swung wildly back and forth. Spectators reportedly screamed, and he was violently airsick on the way down. He still landed safely about half a mile away and was greeted as a hero. The astronomer Jérôme Lalande later suggested cutting a hole in the top of the canopy to steady the fall, and that idea is still part of parachute design today. Garnerin went on to make many more jumps, including one over London in 1802. His wife, Jeanne-Geneviève Labrosse, became the first woman to make a parachute descent. Modern skydiving, military airborne operations, and spacecraft recovery all trace back to that wobbling basket over Paris.
3. 1836 – Sam Houston Becomes President of the Republic of Texas
Six months after his army defeated Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, Sam Houston was inaugurated as the first elected president of the Republic of Texas on October 22, 1836. The ceremony took place in Columbia, a small town on the Brazos River that served as the first capital. Houston had won the September election by a landslide over Henry Smith and Stephen F. Austin, the man often called the "Father of Texas." Houston appointed Austin as his secretary of state, which helped heal old rivalries. The new nation faced serious problems: it had almost no money, an unsettled border with Mexico, conflicts with Native nations, and a sharp debate over whether to seek annexation by the United States. The capital soon moved to a new town on Buffalo Bayou named for the president himself, Houston. The Republic of Texas lasted almost ten years before joining the Union in 1845. Houston's career was unusual by any standard. He was governor of Tennessee, president of Texas twice, a U.S. senator, and governor of Texas. He was removed from that last office in 1861 because he refused to swear loyalty to the Confederacy.
4. 1844 – The Great Disappointment
In the early 1840s, a Baptist preacher named William Miller convinced a large number of Americans that the Second Coming of Christ was close. After earlier dates passed, one of his followers, Samuel S. Snow, studied the prophecies in the Book of Daniel and settled on a precise day: October 22, 1844. Tens of thousands of believers prepared. Some gave away property, left their crops in the fields, and settled their debts. On the night of October 22, Millerites gathered in homes and meeting houses to wait. Nothing happened, and dawn on October 23 brought deep heartbreak. One believer, Hiram Edson, later wrote: "We wept, and wept, till the day dawn." Many followers left the movement, and the press mocked those who stayed. The story did not end there. A group of former Millerites reinterpreted the prophecy, and out of their study came the Seventh-day Adventist Church, formally organized in 1863. Today it has more than 20 million members worldwide and runs one of the largest networks of hospitals and schools of any Protestant denomination. Historians still use the Great Disappointment as a classic example of how a religious community reacts when a firm prediction fails.
5. 1938 – The First Xerographic Copy
Chester Carlson was a patent attorney who spent hours copying documents by hand. He had arthritis, and he wanted a faster way. In a rented room above a beauty salon in Astoria, Queens, he worked with Austrian physicist Otto Kornei on an idea that combined static electricity and light. On October 22, 1938, Kornei wrote "10-22-38 ASTORIA." in ink on a glass slide. They put it over a sulfur-coated zinc plate that had been given a static charge, exposed it to light, and dusted the plate with fine lycopodium powder. Then they pressed wax paper onto it, and the words came off as a copy. The world was not impressed at first. Between 1939 and 1944, more than twenty companies turned Carlson down, including IBM and General Electric. Finally the Battelle Memorial Institute agreed to develop the process, and in 1947 a small Rochester photo-paper company called Haloid licensed it. They named the technology "xerography," from Greek words meaning "dry writing." Haloid later renamed itself Xerox. In 1959 the Xerox 914 became the first easy-to-use plain-paper office copier, and it was a huge success. It changed offices, libraries, and politics; the leak of the Pentagon Papers, for example, depended on photocopying. Carlson became very wealthy and gave most of his fortune to charity. Everything started with that one blurry line of text in Queens.
6. 1962 – Kennedy Reveals the Cuban Missile Crisis
At 7 p.m. Eastern time on October 22, 1962, President John F. Kennedy went on national television to deliver one of the most alarming speeches in American history. American U-2 spy planes had photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites under construction in Cuba, about 90 miles from Florida. Kennedy told viewers that any missile launched from Cuba would be treated as an attack by the Soviet Union and would bring "a full retaliatory response." For six days, Kennedy and his advisers, known as ExComm, had argued in secret about air strikes, an invasion, or diplomacy. They decided on a naval "quarantine" of Cuba. They chose that word on purpose, because a "blockade" counts as an act of war under international law. U.S. forces went to DEFCON 3 that night and to DEFCON 2 two days later, the highest alert level the country has ever officially reached. Soviet ships moved toward the quarantine line, and the world waited. On October 28, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles. In return, the U.S. publicly promised not to invade Cuba and secretly agreed to withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Both sides had come close to disaster. The crisis led to the Moscow–Washington hotline in 1963 and to the first real nuclear arms-control agreements.
7. 1975 – Venera 9 Photographs the Surface of Venus
Venus is often called Earth's twin, but conditions on its surface are brutal. Temperatures are around 465°C (870°F), hot enough to melt lead. The air pressure is about 90 times Earth's, which is roughly what a submarine would feel half a mile underwater. The sky is full of sulfuric acid clouds. Earlier Soviet probes had either been crushed on the way down or survived only long enough to send back basic readings. On October 22, 1975, the Venera 9 lander touched down and did something no spacecraft had done before: it took pictures. The lander was built like a pressure vessel and pre-chilled before entry. It survived for 53 minutes and sent back black-and-white panoramic images of a rock-covered landscape under a surprisingly bright sky. These were the first photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet. Its partner, the Venera 9 orbiter, became the first spacecraft to orbit Venus, and it relayed the lander's data to Earth. Its twin probe, Venera 10, landed three days later, and later Venera missions sent back color images. Venus is a warning about what a runaway greenhouse effect can do to a planet, and it remains a target for new missions. All of that close study began when Venera 9 sent home its first picture.
Reflection: How History Connects Us
The seven events on this list look unrelated at first: a colonial college, a falling balloonist, a frontier president, a failed prophecy, a smudged slide in Queens, a president on television, and a robot sitting in a furnace on Venus. What links them is that people kept going when the outcome was uncertain. Garnerin stepped out of the basket without knowing whether the parachute would work. Carlson kept going through years of rejection, and the Millerites had to rebuild their faith after their hopes collapsed. In 1962, leaders on both sides found a way to step back from catastrophe. All of these moments happened on a single autumn date spread across more than two centuries, and we still live with their effects: in classrooms, in the sky, in the state of Texas, in churches, in every office copier, in the arms-control treaties that kept the Cold War from turning hot, and in our picture of the planets. Every ordinary October 22 still has the potential to be remembered for something.