ON THIS DAY OCTOBER 21

1805 The Battle of Trafalgar takes place between the British Royal Navy and the combined French and Spanish fleets. The victorious British end the threat of Napoleon’s invasion of England. British naval hero Admiral Horatio Nelson is mortally wounded aboard his flagship, Victory.

1854 Florence Nightingale and a staff of 38 nurses are sent to the Crimean War.

1861 American Civil War: Union forces under Colonel Edward Baker are defeated by Confederate troops in the second major battle of the war.

1867 The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed by southern Great Plains Indian leaders, requiring Native American Plains tribes to relocate to a reservation in western Oklahoma.

1879 Thomas Edison applies for a patent for his design for an incandescent light bulb.

1913 Transvaal women satyagrahis begin defiance activities, hawking without licenses in Vereeniging. They cross the Natal border and encourage the miners in Newcastle to strike. 1966 A colliery waste dump collapses on the village of Aberfan, Wales, burying a school, killing 144 people, mostly schoolchildren.

1971 A gas explosion kills 22 people at a shopping centre near Glasgow, Scotland. 1978 Australian civilian pilot Frederick Valentich vanishes in a Cessna 182 over the Bass Strait, south of Melbourne, after reporting contact with an unidentified aircraft.

1983 The metre is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second.

1987 The Jaffna Hospital massacre is carried out by the Indian Peace-keeping Force in Sri Lanka, killing 70 ethnic Tamil patients, doctors and nurses.

2014 Sporting hero Oscar Pistorius is sentenced to five years in prison for killing his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp.

2019 Thailand’s King Vajiralongkorn strips his royal consort, Sineenat Wongvajirapakdi, of her titles for “misbehaviour and disloyalty against the monarch” two months after she was appointed to them. | The Historian