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What happened on October 15 in American history
October 15 is the 288th day of the year (the 289th in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 8 stories from October 15 spanning 1781 to 2016. Among them: in 1781, Graham's riders break the Tory line at Raft Swamp; darkness ends North Carolina's last battle; and in 1954, Hazel comes ashore in the Carolinas; by nightfall it is drowning Toronto.
1781
Graham's riders break the Tory line at Raft Swamp; darkness ends North Carolina's last battle
Four days before Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, a swamp causeway fight scatters the last organized Loyalist force in the state.
1954
Hazel comes ashore in the Carolinas; by nightfall it is drowning Toronto
A Category 4 landfall near Calabash and a flash flood on the Humber River happen hundreds of miles apart, on the same day.
1956Member story · 1776 Club
IBM hands programmers a manual for talking to a machine in algebra
The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System manual reaches the IBM 704's users three years after Backus pitched a way around hand-written machine code.
1991Member story · 1776 Club
A cosmic ray hits Utah with the energy of a thrown baseball
The Fly's Eye detector catches a flash of ultraviolet light that shouldn't be possible under the physics of the day.
1997
A Titan IVB rises from Cape Canaveral, carrying Cassini toward Saturn
The seven-year voyage begins with 72 pounds of plutonium and a DVD of 616,400 signatures tucked aboard.
2001Member story · 1776 Club
Galileo threads Jupiter's radiation belts for a 112-mile pass over Io
The spacecraft's instruments catch electrical currents linking the volcanic moon to Jupiter itself.
2008Member story · 1776 Club
The Dow sheds 733 points; only Black Monday fell faster
A 7.87 percent close puts the 2008 financial crisis in the same sentence as 1987.
2016Member story · 1776 Club
In Kigali, 197 nations agree to phase down the coolants replacing the last banned chemicals
The chemicals that replaced ozone-killing CFCs turned out to trap heat thousands of times more effectively than carbon dioxide.
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