October 29
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1945
The ballpoint pen arrives
On this day in 1945, some 5,000 people showed up at Gimbels department store in New York City. Why? They all wanted to buy the Reynolds Rocket, the first ballpoint pen to be sold commercially in the United States. At $12.50, the pen was far from inexpensive. (That’s about $230 today.) Nonetheless, it was an instant sensation, with about 30,000 sold the first week. Discover why some customers regretted their purchase.
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© Circa Images/GHI/Universal History Archive—Universal Images Group/Getty Images; Photo Illustration Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Featured Event
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Just five days after nearly 13 million shares of U.S. stock were sold in one day in 1929, an additional 16 million shares were sold this day, called “Black Tuesday,” further fueling the crisis known as the Great Depression.
Featured Biography
Featured Biography
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Born this day in 1938, Liberian politician and economist Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the first woman to be voted head of state of an African country, and she later won the Nobel Prize for Peace for her work on women’s rights.
Famous Birthdays
More on October 29
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
2015
It was announced that China was ending its one-child policy; beginning in 2016, couples could have two children. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about China.]
U.S. Geological Survey
1998
Hurricane Mitch made landfall, hitting northern Honduras; one of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record, it caused some 11,000 deaths in Central America. [Test your knowledge of disasters of historic proportions.]
Photograph by kaldari. Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga, Tenn., gift of Miss Inez Hyder, accession number 1956.1
1933
American artist George Luks—one of a group of American painters popularly known as the Ashcan school because of their realistic treatment of urban scenes—died at age 66. [Take our ultimate art quiz.]
Victor Console/ANL/REX/Shutterstock.com
1923
The Republic of Turkey was established, largely through the efforts of Kemal Atatürk, who is considered the country’s founder and served as its first president. [Test your knowledge of Turkish and Ottoman history.]
© ullstein bild/Getty Images
1897
Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich under Adolf Hitler, was born. [Take our quiz about infamous Nazis.]