October 18 ...

In 1685 King Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had established legal toleration of France's Protestant population, the Huguenots. In 1767 the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Mason-Dixon line, was agreed upon. In 1867 the United States took formal possession of Alaska from Russia. In 1892 the first long-distance telephone line between Chicago and New York was formally opened. In 1898 the American flag was raised in Puerto Rico shortly before Spain formally relinquished control of the island to the US. In 1931 inventor Thomas Alva Edison died in West Orange, NJ, at age 84. In 1939 Chicago Bears Hall-of-Famer Michael Keller Ditka was born in Carnegie, PA. In 1944 Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia during World War II. In 1962 Dr. James D. Watson of the US, and Dr. Francis Crick and Dr. Maurice Wilkins of Britain, were named winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology for their work in determining the double-helix molecular structure of DNA. In 1969 the federal government banned artificial sweeteners known as cyclamates because of evidence they caused cancer in laboratory rats. In 1982 former first lady Bess Truman died at her home in Independence, MO, at age 97.