In 1929, October 24 was “Black Thursday,” the day the New York Stock Exchange crashed by 11 percent. Then on October 24, 2008, it was “Black Friday,” the day most of the stock exchanges around the world crashed by 10 percent or more.
You might say the value of stocks those days dropped like a barrel going over a waterfall — which would be an excellent analogy, because October 24 is also the day, in 1901, that Annie Edson Taylor was the first person (as far as anybody knows) to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She did it on purpose — which you’d have to assume, because why else would anyone wind up floating down the Niagara River in a barrel? It was a stunt she came up with hoping to cash in on…well, something. It’s possible the whole thing might not have been thought through as carefully as it might have been.
To make the stunt more noteworthy, Taylor did it on her 63rd birthday. When they retrieved the barrel and let her out, she was fine except for a small cut on her head. But although she made the headlines and did some public speaking, she never got the cash windfall she was hoping for. Maybe because of that, she didn’t really enjoy the experience. She was quoted in the newspaper stories as saying “I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Fall.”
Because it was 1901, and October 24, the news was able to travel fast. That was partly thanks to another October 24th — the one in 1861, when the first telegraph line was connected across the entire country. It was the first time people in California could get important news immediately. Luckily for them, this eventually included the astonishing fact that somebody had survived going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, which, of course, everybody had probably been wondering about for at least the 40 years between the telegraph line’s completion and Taylor’s feat.
Another way of dealing with a river in New York state opened on October 24 in 1931: the George Washington Bridge. It was the bridge with the longest span in the world for six years, until the Golden Gate Bridge opened. It famously has two levels of roads, but when it opened only the upper one had been built. The extra deck had been in the original design, but it wasn’t built until 30 years later.
If you want to travel somewhere, you could float in a barrel, or you could cross a bridge, but from 1976 until October 24, 2003 you also had the option of a supersonic flight on the Concorde. It was a pretty exclusive ticket though; only 20 Concordes were ever built, and of those, only 14 were ever put into service. They could reach speeds of over 1,300 mph. That’s pretty fast, but peanuts compared to the plans for the X-20 “Dyna-soar,” the space plane program that kicked off on October 24, 1957. Although it was eventually cancelled (possibly because of embarrassment over the name) and never launched, the Dyna-soar looked very much like the Space Shuttle, just 25 years earlier.
Even though the Dyna-soar was never launched, several things have been launched on October 24. In 1998 the “Deep Space 1” probe began a mission to the asteroid belt. It was the first spacecraft to use an “ion drive” instead of chemical thrusters to maneuver in space. Then on the same day in 2007, the “Chang’e 1” was launched from China; it was the first spacecraft in the Chinese moon program. “Chang’e” is the name of the traditional Chinese moon goddess. There were several “Chang-e” probes, up to “Chang’e 5”, which was launched on the same day in 2014. That one looped around the moon and came back to Earth, landing in Mongolia seven days later.
The Chinese space program hasn’t announced any manned missions to the moon, although they’ve mentioned the possibility. It’s something everybody’s probably been thinking about at least since October 24, 1901. All those space probes look pretty much like barrels, after all.
