On August 10, 1519, Ferdinand Magellan led five ships and roughly 270 men out of Seville, sailing down the Guadalquivir River toward the Atlantic in search of a westward route to the Spice Islands. Magellan himself would die in the Philippines in 1521, but one battered ship, the Victoria, completed the circumnavigation in 1522, forever proving the Earth's oceans were interconnected.
On August 10, 1792, a mob of Parisian insurrectionists and defected National Guard units stormed the Tuileries Palace, where King Louis XVI had taken refuge. Around 600 of the king's Swiss Guard were killed in the fighting or massacred afterward. Louis and his family had already fled to the Legislative Assembly, but the attack effectively ended the monarchy and set the stage for the Republic and, eventually, the king's execution.
On August 10, 1809, a group of Quito's elite, alarmed by Napoleon's occupation of Spain, deposed the colonial president and formed their own governing junta loyal to the deposed Spanish king Ferdinand VII. The 'Primer Grito de la Independencia' (First Cry of Independence) collapsed within months when royalist forces retook the city, but it lit a fuse that would eventually detonate across the continent.
On August 10, 1821, Missouri was formally admitted as the 24th state, completing the fraught political bargain known as the Missouri Compromise. The deal, engineered by Henry Clay, admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state while banning slavery in the remaining Louisiana Territory north of the 36°30' parallel, a fragile balance that held for over three decades.
James Smithson, an English chemist who never set foot in the United States, left his fortune to found 'an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge' in Washington. A decade after his death, Congress finally acted, and Polk signed the charter creating the Smithsonian Institution on August 10, 1846, launching what would become the world's largest museum and research complex.
On August 10, 1941, construction began on the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, designed to consolidate the War Department's sprawling, scattered offices into a single building. The five-sided design was chosen partly because of the irregular pentagon-shaped plot of land originally selected, and the building was rushed to completion in just 16 months, becoming one of the largest office buildings in the world.
On August 10, 1945, following the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Soviet entry into the war against Japan, the Japanese government sent a message to the Allies through neutral Switzerland and Sweden accepting the Potsdam Declaration's terms, on the condition that the Emperor's sovereign position be maintained. The message set off feverish negotiations that would culminate in Japan's formal surrender five days later.
On August 10, 1949, a powerful earthquake struck Ecuador's central highlands, devastating the city of Ambato and killing an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people. The disaster, one of the deadliest in Ecuador's history, prompted a fundamental overhaul of the country's building codes and disaster response systems.
