TITLE: October 24: Treaties, Telegrams, and a Barrel Over Niagara
October 24 has seen treaties that changed how nations relate to each other, technology that shrank a continent, and individual acts of nerve. Here are seven moments from this date that still matter.
1. 1648 - The Peace of Westphalia Ends the Thirty Years' War
For thirty years, starting in 1618, Central Europe was torn apart by a war that began as a religious fight between Catholic and Protestant states in the Holy Roman Empire and grew into a continental power struggle involving France, Sweden, Spain, and dozens of smaller states. Armies lived off the land, and famine and disease followed them. Historians estimate that between 4.5 and 8 million people died, and some German regions lost a third or more of their population. On October 24, 1648, diplomats signed treaties in the Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück that brought the Holy Roman Emperor to terms with France and Sweden. Together with an earlier treaty that year ending Spain's long war with the Dutch Republic, the "Peace of Westphalia" redrew the map, formally recognized Swiss independence, and confirmed that rulers could set their own territory's religious practice. Political scientists often call it the birth of "Westphalian sovereignty," the idea that states have exclusive authority within their borders and that outside powers shouldn't interfere in their internal affairs. Historians argue about how much the treaties actually intended that. Either way, the principle still shapes international law, and the negotiations were among the first great multinational peace conferences, a model for the diplomacy that followed.
2. 1861 - The First Transcontinental Telegram Crosses America
Before October 1861, news from California took about ten days to reach the East Coast, and that was by the Pony Express, the famous relay of riders on fast horses. The Western Union telegraph lines, built from east and west, finally met in Salt Lake City, and on October 24 Stephen J. Field, Chief Justice of California, sent the first transcontinental telegram to President Abraham Lincoln. The timing mattered. The Civil War had begun six months earlier, and Field's message affirmed California's loyalty to the Union. That was no small thing, because the far West's allegiance and its gold were vital to the Union cause. A message that once took days now arrived in moments. The Pony Express, which had run for only about 18 months, announced its closure two days later. Its riders became legends, but the telegram made them obsolete almost overnight. It was an early example of a pattern we still see: a new communications technology arrives and a celebrated older one disappears almost at once.
3. 1901 - Annie Edson Taylor Goes Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel
Annie Edson Taylor was a widowed schoolteacher from Michigan with no money and a bold plan. She would become the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, then make her fortune lecturing about it. She had a custom barrel built from oak and iron, padded with a mattress, and according to popular accounts she first sent a cat over in it as a test. The cat reportedly survived. On October 24, 1901, her birthday, Taylor climbed into the barrel and was towed into the Niagara River's current. She went over the Canadian Horseshoe Falls, a drop of roughly 170 feet. When rescuers pried the barrel open about 20 minutes later, she was alive, with only a gash on her head. Her first words, as reported, were a warning: "No one ought ever do that again." She had told the press she was 43, but she was actually turning 63. Sadly, the fortune never came. Her manager disappeared with the barrel, and Taylor died in poverty in 1921. She still holds a place in history as the first person to survive the plunge, and she did it at an age when most people would never have considered it.
4. 1929 - Black Thursday Shakes Wall Street
The 1920s stock market seemed like it would only go up. Ordinary Americans bought shares "on margin," borrowing most of the purchase price and betting that prices would keep climbing. On the morning of Thursday, October 24, 1929, confidence broke. Sell orders flooded the New York Stock Exchange, prices collapsed, and a record 12.9 million shares changed hands. The ticker tape ran hours behind, so investors couldn't even tell how much they had lost. At midday, a group of leading bankers met at J.P. Morgan & Co. and pooled money to prop up the market. NYSE vice president Richard Whitney walked onto the floor and loudly offered to buy U.S. Steel shares above the market price. It worked for a while, and the market partly recovered by the close. The relief lasted only until the following week, when "Black Monday" and "Black Tuesday" (October 28–29) brought even worse losses. The crash didn't cause the Great Depression on its own, but it was the most visible sign of an economy in trouble and the starting point of a decade of hardship. It also led directly to reforms such as the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
5. 1945 - The United Nations Is Born
Delegates from 50 nations signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco in June 1945, in the closing months of World War II. The organization didn't legally exist yet, though. It needed ratification by the five permanent members of the Security Council (the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, and China) and by a majority of the other signatories. That threshold was met on October 24, 1945, and the United Nations officially came into being with 51 founding members. The UN was built on the failure of the League of Nations, which had been unable to prevent a second world war. Its founders tried to fix the League's weaknesses by including the major powers, giving the Security Council real authority, and creating specialized agencies for health, food, children, and refugees. The UN has a mixed record. It has been criticized for paralysis in some crises and praised for peacekeeping, humanitarian relief, and campaigns such as the eradication of smallpox. It now has 193 member states. Since 1948, October 24 has been celebrated worldwide as United Nations Day.
6. 1946 - The First Photograph of Earth from Space
After World War II, the United States brought captured German V-2 rockets to White Sands, New Mexico, for research. On October 24, 1946, scientists put a 35mm motion-picture camera on one of them, set to take a frame every second and a half. The rocket climbed to about 65 miles (105 km), past the line many consider the edge of space, and the camera photographed the Earth below. The rocket then crashed into the desert, but the film survived inside a rugged steel cassette. When the team, including a 19-year-old enlisted soldier named Fred Rulli, recovered and developed it, they saw grainy black-and-white images of the curve of the Earth with clouds over the American Southwest. One researcher reportedly described the reaction as near-hysterical joy. These blurry frames came more than two decades before the famous "Earthrise" and "Blue Marble" photos from the Apollo missions. They were the first time humanity saw its home from above, and they led to weather satellites, Earth observation, and the change in perspective that comes from seeing our planet as one fragile whole.
7. 1975 - Iceland's Women Take the Day Off
On October 24, 1975, women in Iceland decided to show their country how much it depended on them. About 90% of Icelandic women refused to work, cook, clean, or look after children for the day. Organizers called it a "day off" rather than a strike to make it easier for women to take part, and about 25,000 of them filled downtown Reykjavík for a rally. That was a remarkable crowd in a nation of only about 220,000 people. The country almost stopped. Banks, factories, schools, and shops closed or operated with skeleton staff. Telephone service faltered, newspapers struggled to print, and fathers had to bring their children to work. Shops reportedly ran out of sausages, an easy meal for men suddenly in charge of dinner. Icelanders remember it as "the long Friday." The effects were lasting. Iceland passed an equal pay law the next year, and in 1980 the nation elected Vigdís Finnbogadóttir as president, the first woman in the world democratically elected head of state. Iceland has regularly ranked first in global gender-equality indexes, and Icelandic women have repeated the strike several times, most recently in 2023, when the prime minister joined them.
Reflection: The Threads That Bind Us
Looking across these seven October 24ths, a few themes recur. Exhausted nations sat down at Westphalia and in San Francisco to build institutions so the horrors they had lived through wouldn't happen again. The telegram wires and the V-2 camera made the world feel smaller and showed it to us whole. Black Thursday showed how much depends on shared confidence. Annie Edson Taylor and the women of Iceland showed what one person, or a whole nation of people acting together, can do. The diplomats, telegraph operators, schoolteachers, and young soldiers behind these events never knew they would end up in a history lesson. They were living their own October 24, as we are living ours.