Today in History: What happened on October 21? Developments in Turkey and the world on October 21...

1860: The first private political newspaper, Tercüman-ı Ahval, began publication. Its owner was Çapanoğlu Agah Efendi from Yozgat.

1879: Thomas Edison invented the carbon-filament electric light bulb.

1935: Germany officially withdrew from the League of Nations.

1938: The Japanese occupied the city of Canton, China.

1940: Ernest Hemingway's book For Whom the Bell Tolls was published in New York.

1945: Women in France gained the right to vote for the first time.

1945: A census was conducted. It was announced that the population of Turkey was 18,871,203. The population of Istanbul province was 1,071,686.

1950: Chinese troops occupied Tibet.

1965: The Ikeya-Seki comet passed 450,000 kilometers from the sun.

1969: In West Germany, Social Democrat Willy Brandt was elected Chancellor.

1971: Pablo Neruda received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

1972: Professor Mümtaz Soysal was arrested by the Ankara Martial Law Command on charges of spreading communist propaganda in his textbook titled Introduction to the Constitution.

1973: Necmettin Erbakan was elected Chairman of the National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi).

1977: The European Patent Institute (EPI) was established.

1981: The foundation of the Atatürk Dam was laid by Head of State Kenan Evren.

1983: The unit of length, the meter, was redefined based on the speed of light, but its length remained the same. Accordingly, 1 meter is the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

1984: The Afşin-Elbistan Thermal Power Plant was opened.

1985: The work titled The Lowest of the Low (Ganz Unten) by German journalist and author Günter Wallraff, in which he recounts his experiences living as a Turkish worker, was released.

1987: The first F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter jet assembled in Turkey was flown in an official ceremony.

1998: The Grand National Assembly of Turkey (TBMM) approved the expansion of NATO. Thus, the approval of all 16 alliance member countries was completed, and the expansion was finalized.

1999: 110 people were killed and 400 were injured in a rocket attack on a crowded shopping center in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.

1999: Ahmet Taner Kışlalı was killed in a bomb assassination.

2005: Tarja Turunen, the famous vocalist of the Finnish rock band Nightwish for 9 years, was fired after her final concert with the band.

2007: The 2007 Civil Constitution was voted on by the public in a referendum.