October 4

Georges Legrain, the French Egyptologist who uncovered the great Karnak 'Cachette' of hundreds of statues, was born on this day in 1865.

Physicist Max Planck, whose 1900 quantum hypothesis founded quantum theory, died on 4 October 1947 in Göttingen; he received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, on 4 October 1957, opening the Space Age as its radio beeps were tracked around the world.