November 8

Mordecai Kaplan, the rabbi and educator who founded Reconstructionist Judaism, died at the age of 102 in Riverdale, New York.

Dorothy Day, the journalist and social activist who co-founded the Catholic Worker Movement, was born in Brooklyn, New York.

Edmond Halley, the English astronomer who computed a comet's orbit and correctly predicted its return, was born near London.

In his darkened Würzburg laboratory, Wilhelm Röntgen noticed a distant screen glowing and identified a new penetrating radiation he named X-rays.