What happened on 17 October?

15 events from the Ever-When timeline, ranked by how much they mattered.

1. 1973 1973 oil crisis OAPEC embargo quadruples oil prices; ends the post-war economic boom.
2. 1856 Bessemer process patented Cheap mass production of steel from molten pig iron; made skyscrapers possible and transformed rail networks.
3. 1887 French Indochina established France consolidates colonial rule over Vietnam and Cambodia in the Indochinese Union (Laos added in 1899).
4. 1854 Crimean War siege of Sevastopol Year-long siege; eventual Allied capture of the Russian port.
5. 1815 Napoleon's exile to Saint Helena Final exile of Napoleon to a remote Atlantic island; he died there in 1821.
6. 1979 Mother Teresa awarded Nobel Peace Prize Albanian-born Indian missionary honoured for work with the poor of Calcutta.
7. 1956 Calder Hall: first commercial nuclear power Britain opens the world's first full-scale nuclear power station to feed a grid, opening the civilian atomic age.
8. 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio Ended the War of the First Coalition; Austria ceded the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) to France.
9. 1896 Chekhov's The Seagull Hissed off the stage at its St Petersburg premiere, Chekhov's play of thwarted artists triumphs two years later at the new Moscow Art Theatre, which takes the seagull as its emblem
10. 1933 Einstein emigrates to the United States Abroad when Hitler takes power, Einstein renounces German citizenship and settles at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, never returning to Germany.
11. 1945 Loyalty Day in Buenos Aires When rival officers arrest the popular labour minister Colonel Perón, hundreds of thousands of workers pour into the Plaza de Mayo and force his release — the founding day of Peron
12. 1806 Assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines Two years into his imperial rule, Haiti's founder is ambushed and killed at Pont-Rouge outside Port-au-Prince by soldiers of his own officers, and the new state splits in two.
13. 2020 Ardern's 2020 election landslide Rewarded for keeping Covid out, Labour wins half the vote and the first outright majority since New Zealand adopted proportional representation in 1996.
14. 1957 Camus wins the Nobel Prize in Literature At 44, Camus becomes one of the youngest laureates; he dedicates his Stockholm speech to the schoolteacher who taught him as a poor boy in Algiers.
15. 2000 I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me) (Jay-Z) The Neptunes' playful hit for Roc-A-Fella.