October 30 · This Day in America
It is the night before Halloween, and a 23-year-old Orson Welles is on CBS with the Mercury Theatre. He takes H.G. Wells's old novel and tells it as a series of breaking news bulletins: a cylinder lands at Grovers Mill, New Jersey; the militia is overrun; the announcer's voice cracks and goes silent. The dance music keeps returning, unbearably calm. Listeners who tuned in late, who never heard it was a play, reach for the phone. Police switchboards light up. Newspapers, with reasons of their own, blow the next morning's panic into legend. The real number who fled was small — but the night still landed like a thunderclap, because it revealed something true: a country wired together by radio could be moved, all at once, by a single confident voice. We have been arguing about that power ever since.
Source: www.smithsonianmag.com
Also on this day · 1735
He arrives in a modest saltbox house in Massachusetts, a farmer's son who would rather read than plow. Stubborn, brilliant, vain, and incorruptible, he defends hated British soldiers in court because the law demands it, argues the Declaration through Congress, and becomes the second president. He dies fifty years to the day after independence — the same afternoon as Jefferson. The farm boy never stopped believing the experiment would hold.
Source: www.whitehousehistory.org