October 25

1647: Italian physicist and mathematician Evangelista Torricelli, who invented the barometer, died. 1789: Samuel Schwabe, who first documented the roughly 10-year sunspot cycle, died. 1825: The Erie Canal opened, linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. 1877: American astronomer Henry Russell, who showed the relationship between a star's brightness and its spectral type, and co-created the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, was born. 1888: U.S. explorer, and the first to make a flight over the North Pole, Richard Byrd, was born. 1910: William Higinbotham, who invented the first video game, "Tennis for Two," was born. 1934: Frank Julian Sprague, prodigious electrical design engineer, died. 1980: Floyd Bennett, who piloted the airplane that flew Admiral Byrd, was born. 1960: The Accutron 214, the world's first electronic wristwatch, went on sale from Bulova. 1962: Belgium's first nuclear powered electrical generation plant went online.