Following are some of the major events to have occurred on Oct 04
Reuters
1918 - Explosion at shell-loading plant in Gillespie munitions factory in New York.
1957 - The Soviet Union became the first nation in space, launching the Sputnik-I satellite into orbit 500 miles above the Earth. 1958 - The first transoceanic passenger jet service was inaugurated between New York and London by the British Overseas Airways Corporation.
1966 - Lesotho, formerly the British colony of Basutoland, became independent.
1993 - Russian President Boris Yeltsin crushed a hardline communist rebellion.
2001 - A Russian Sibir airlines Tu-154 carrying up to 78 passengers and crew on a flight from Israel was accidentally shot down during Ukrainian missile exercises over the Black Sea.
2001 - Sydney University announce world's first successful selection of sex before conception in 25 lambs.
2002 - Nepal's King Gyanendra dismissed prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and took over the government.
2003 - A Palestinian suicide bomber killed 23 people in a popular restaurant in the northern Israeli city of Haifa.
2004 - U.S. scientists Frank Wilczek, David Gross and David Politzer won the Nobel physics prize for explaining how the basic building blocks of nature, quarks, interact.
2004 - Three American scientists win Nobel Prize for Physics for showing how tiny quark particles interact, explaining everything from how a coin spins to how the universe was built.
2005 - Turkey opened membership negotiations with the European Union, 42 years after first being given the prospect of membership in the wealthy bloc.
