October 17 in strange history
What strange thing happened on October 17? Here are the stories from our files for this date, each checked against sources.
The London Beer Flood (1814)
On 17 October 1814 a huge vat at the Meux and Company brewery on Tottenham Court Road burst, setting off a chain reaction that released a flood of porter, .
The Photographer Who Got Away with Murder (1874)
The full story of how Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneer of motion photography, shot his wife's lover dead in 1874, was acquitted as a justifiable homicide, and went on to help invent the movies.