From on-this-day.com
1483 Martin Luther was born
1801 The U.S. state of Tennessee outlawed the practice of dueling
1951 Direct-dial, coast-to-coast telephone service began when Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, NJ, called his counterpart in Alameda, CA
1970 The Great Wall of China opened for tourism
1975 The Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore-hauling ship, and its crew of 29 vanished during a storm in Lake Superior
1980 CBS News anchor Dan Rather claimed he had been kidnapped in a cab. It turned out that Rather had refused to pay the cab fare
1993 John Wayne Bobbitt was acquitted on the charge of marital sexual assault against his wife who sexually mutilated him. Lorena Bobbitt was later acquitted of malicious wounding her husband