October 21 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on October 21

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772)

  English poet and critic known for 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan.'

• Alfred Nobel (1833)

  Swedish chemist and inventor of dynamite, whose will established the Nobel Prizes.

• Carrie Fisher (1956)

  American actress and writer known for playing Princess Leia in the Star Wars film series.

• Kim Kardashian (1980)

  American media personality and businesswoman known for Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

This Day in History

• 1805 — The Royal Navy under Admiral Horatio Nelson decisively defeated the combined French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar, though Nelson himself was fatally wounded during the fighting.

• 1879 — Thomas Edison successfully tested a long-lasting carbon-filament incandescent light bulb in his Menlo Park laboratory, a key step toward practical electric lighting.

• 2015 — October 21, 2015 was the specific future date to which Marty McFly traveled in the 1989 film Back to the Future Part II, making the date a widely noted pop-culture milestone when it finally arrived.

What October 21 Says About You

Alfred Nobel, born on this date in 1833, spent his career inventing dynamite, a discovery that made him enormously wealthy and, according to a widely told account, deeply uneasy about his legacy after a premature obituary mistakenly described him as a 'merchant of death' — a misprint said to have prompted him to redirect his fortune toward funding the Nobel Prizes instead. It's a fitting birthday for a date whose own history swings just as sharply between destruction and illumination. The Battle of Trafalgar was fought on this date in 1805, a decisive naval victory for Admiral Horatio Nelson's Royal Navy fleet against the combined French and Spanish forces, won at the cost of Nelson's own life during the fighting — a triumph and a loss arriving in the same afternoon. Thomas Edison successfully tested a long-lasting carbon-filament light bulb in his Menlo Park laboratory on this same date in 1879, a considerably gentler kind of breakthrough that nonetheless changed daily life just as thoroughly as any battle. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, born on this date in 1772, wrote some of English poetry's most vivid, unsettling imagery, work that sits comfortably alongside a birthday shared with an explosives inventor and a naval battle that ended in both victory and death. In popular culture, this date carries a lighter kind of significance too: October 21, 2015 was the specific future date Marty McFly traveled to in Back to the Future Part II, and when the real date finally arrived, it became a genuine, widely covered pop-culture milestone, decades after the film's release. Carrie Fisher, born on this date in 1956, spent a career as a decisive, sharp-witted screen presence in her own science-fiction franchise, a nice echo of the date's other pop-culture footnote. Libra is the zodiac reading for this date, and numerology reduces the 21st to day number 3, associated with creativity and expression — fitting for Coleridge's poetry, and fitting too for Edison's inventive breakthrough, itself a creative act even if it emerged from an engineering lab rather than a writer's desk. October's birthstone opal, prized for containing flashes of many different colors within one stone, mirrors a date whose history holds a devastating naval victory, a life-changing invention, and a science-fiction time-travel joke all within the same 24 hours. Neither of the month's flowers carries a particular tie to explosives or light bulbs, though the marigold's brightness against the dimming light of late autumn feels like a small, genuine echo of Edison's own pursuit of light against darkness.