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Tuesday 13 October 2026
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FILE NO. 10.13 5 specimens · est. 1307-1884

What happened on October 13?

Real photographs, all filed under this date. Name each event before you read on.
Case Timeline 1307-1884 · 577 years
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What happened on October 13

All 5 specimens from this file, spanning 1307 to 1884, with the story behind each photograph.

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  1. A painting of a bearded old man in a white mantle with a red cross, chained at the ankles, standing with arms outstretched in a vaulted stone chamber while a guard with a spear watches from a doorway.
    History · 1307

    A king has every member of a wealthy military order arrested in one dawn sweep

    Philip IV of France had sealed orders opened across the kingdom at dawn on Friday 13 October 1307, and hundreds of Knights Templar were seized the same morning. He owed them a great deal of money. Confessions were extracted under torture and later retracted; the order was dissolved and its last grand master burned in 1314.

  2. A sepia photograph looking steeply down on a dense grid of nineteenth century rooftops, streets and church spires, with harbour wharves and masted ships along the top edge.
    Technology · 1860

    A photographer goes up in a tethered balloon and takes the first aerial picture in America

    James Wallace Black went up over Boston in a tethered balloon on 13 October 1860 and brought back the oldest surviving aerial photograph taken in the United States. He made many exposures and almost all failed. Oliver Wendell Holmes described the result as Boston as the eagle and the wild goose see it.

  3. An oil painting of a black-hulled sailing brig at anchor in a bay under a striped flag, with a fort and a green hillside town behind and smoke drifting from a salute.
    Conflict · 1775

    A congress votes to fit out two armed ships and founds a navy by accident

    The Continental Congress voted on 13 October 1775 to fit out two small armed vessels to intercept British supply ships. It was a modest decision about two boats, and it is counted as the birthday of the United States Navy. By the end of the war the Continental Navy had lost almost every ship it owned.

  4. A brick and stone observatory building with white quoins and a small turret carrying a tall mast topped by a large red ball, photographed against a deep blue sky.
    Metrology · 1884

    A conference picks one observatory to be the line all longitude is measured from

    Delegates from 25 nations voted on 13 October 1884 to make the meridian through Greenwich the world's prime meridian. Britain's charts already dominated shipping, which settled it. France abstained and went on printing Paris as zero for another 27 years.

  5. A telescope image of a spiral galaxy with pink star-forming knots along its blue arms, a smaller yellow companion galaxy attached at the end of one arm.
    Astronomy · 1773

    A comet hunter logs a faint spiral smudge to stop himself mistaking it for a comet

    Charles Messier catalogued the Whirlpool on 13 October 1773. He was hunting comets and kept a list of fuzzy objects that were not comets so he would stop wasting nights on them. That reject list is now the most famous catalogue of galaxies and nebulae in astronomy, and nobody remembers his comets.