TODAY IN MILITARY HISTORY
24 October
✦69 Second Battle of Bedriacum: Primus defeats Vitellius, to make Vespasian Emperor.
✦439 Carthage, the leading Roman city in North Africa, falls to Genseric and the Vandals.
✦964 Battle of Rometta: The Fatimids defeat the Byzantines.
✦1147 Besieged since June, Lisbon falls to Afonso I of Portugal.
✦1158 Battle of Orkney: Danes Svein and Erland defeat Earl Harald of Orkney
✦1531 Bavaria, despite being a Catholic region, joins the League of Schmalkalden, a Protestant group which opposes Charles V.
✦1648 The signing of the Treaty of Westphalia ends the German Thirty Years' War.
✦1755 A British expedition against the French held Fort Niagara in Canada ends in failure.
✦1836 The match is patented.
✦1861 Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line, putting the Pony Express out of business.
✦1863 General Ulysses S. Grant arrives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to find the Union Army there starving.
✦1917 The Austro-German army routs the Italian army at Caporetto, Italy.
✦1929 Black Thursday–the first day of the stock market crash which began the Great Depression.
✦1931 Al (Alphonse) Capone, the prohibition-era Chicago gangster, is sent to prison for tax evasion.
✦1944 The aircraft carrier USS Princeton is sunk by a single Japanese plane during the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
✦1945 The United Nations comes into existence with the ratification of its charter by the first 29 nations.
✦1945 Vidkun Quisling, Norway's wartime minister president, is executed by firing squad for collaboration with the Nazis.
✦1973 Yom Kippur War ends.
✦1980 Poland's government legalizes the Solidarity trade union.
✦2003 The supersonic Concorde jet made its last commercial passenger flight from New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport to London's Heathrow Airport, traveling at twice the speed of sound.
✦2008 Many stock exchanges worldwide suffer the steepest declines in their histories; the day becomes known as "Bloody Friday."