In 843, the three surviving grandsons of Charlemagne, Lothair, Louis the German, and Charles the Bald, signed the Treaty of Verdun, ending three years of civil war by splitting the Carolingian Empire into West Francia, Middle Francia, and East Francia. The rough boundaries anticipated the future shapes of France and Germany, and the disputed middle kingdom became a fault line of European conflict for over a thousand years.
On November 21, 1783, physics teacher Jean-Francois Pilatre de Rozier and army officer Francois Laurent, the Marquis d'Arlandes, lifted off from the Bois de Boulogne in a Montgolfier brothers' hot air balloon, achieving the first sustained, untethered flight by humans in history. Watched by a crowd including Benjamin Franklin, the linen and paper balloon carried them roughly 9 kilometers across Paris in about 25 minutes before landing safely, opening the age of aviation.
On November 21, 1929, Benito Mussolini's government formally approved the demolition project that would create the Via della Conciliazione, a broad avenue linking the Tiber to St. Peter's Square. The street symbolized the 1929 Lateran Treaty that ended decades of hostility between the Italian state and the Papacy, though it required flattening the ancient Borgo neighborhood, a decision still debated by preservationists.
On November 21, 1944, kamikaze aircraft continued their assault on the US Seventh Fleet supporting the Leyte campaign in the Philippines, part of a deliberate new tactic Japan had adopted weeks earlier as conventional naval power collapsed. The suicide strikes, born of desperation after catastrophic losses at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October, signaled a grim shift toward attritional terror that would intensify through Okinawa in 1945.
On November 21, 1963, India launched its first sounding rocket, a Nike-Apache supplied by the United States, from the Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station near Thiruvananthapuram. The modest launch, organized by a young Vikram Sarabhai and a team that included A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, marked the origin of what would become the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO.
On November 21, 1989, the crowds that had begun gathering in Prague after a police crackdown on students four days earlier swelled into the hundreds of thousands, filling Wenceslas Square in defiance of the Communist regime. Actor and dissident Vaclav Havel addressed the throng from a balcony, and the demonstrations, entirely peaceful, made clear that four decades of one-party rule in Czechoslovakia were entering their final days.
On November 21, 1990, CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee and Belgian engineer Robert Cailliau finalized a project proposal and put the first web server, httpd, and the first browser, WorldWideWeb, into working order at CERN in Geneva. The system let physicists link documents across computers using simple hypertext, a modest tool that would reshape global communication, commerce, and culture within a decade.