| 118291 | October 16 | Event | 1781 – George Washington captures Yorktown, Virginia after the Siege of Yorktown. |
| 118292 | October 16 | Event | 1793 – Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis XVI, is guillotined at the height of the French Revolution. |
| 118293 | October 16 | Event | 1793 – The Battle of Wattignies ends in a French victory. |
| 118294 | October 16 | Event | 1813 – The Sixth Coalition attacks Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of Leipzig. |
| 118295 | October 16 | Event | 1834 – Much of the ancient structure of the Palace of Westminster in London burns to the ground. |
| 118296 | October 16 | Event | 1841 – Queen's University is founded in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. |
| 118297 | October 16 | Event | 1843 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton comes up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers. |
| 118298 | October 16 | Event | 1846 – William T. G. Morton first demonstrated ether anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the Ether Dome. |
| 118299 | October 16 | Event | 1859 – John Brown leads a raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. |
| 118300 | October 16 | Event | 1869 – The Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, is "discovered". |
| 118301 | October 16 | Event | 1869 – Girton College, Cambridge is founded, becoming England's first residential college for women. |
| 118302 | October 16 | Event | 1875 – Brigham Young University is founded in Provo, Utah. |
| 118303 | October 16 | Event | 1882 – The Nickel Plate Railroad opens for business. |
| 118304 | October 16 | Event | 1905 – The Partition of Bengal in India takes place. |
| 118305 | October 16 | Event | 1906 – The Captain of Köpenick fools the city hall of Köpenick and several soldiers by impersonating a Prussian officer. |
| 118306 | October 16 | Event | 1909 – William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz hold a summit, a first between a U.S. and a Mexican president, and they only narrowly escape assassination. |
| 118307 | October 16 | Event | 1916 – In Brooklyn, New York, Margaret Sanger opens the first family planning clinic in the United States. |
| 118308 | October 16 | Event | 1923 – The Walt Disney Company is founded by Walt Disney and his brother, Roy Disney. |
| 118309 | October 16 | Event | 1934 – Chinese Communists begin the Long March it ended a year and four days later, by which time Mao Zedong had regained his title as party chairman. |
| 118310 | October 16 | Event | 1939 – World War II: First attack on British territory by the German Luftwaffe. |
| 118311 | October 16 | Event | 1940 – Holocaust: The Warsaw Ghetto is established. |
| 118312 | October 16 | Event | 1943 – Holocaust: Raid of the Ghetto of Rome |
| 118313 | October 16 | Event | 1944 – Wally Walrus, Woody Woodpecker's first steady foil, debuts in the The Beach Nut, a Walter Lantz's cartoon. |
| 118314 | October 16 | Event | 1945 – The Food and Agriculture Organization is founded in Quebec City, Canada. |
| 118315 | October 16 | Event | 1946 – Nuremberg trials: Execution of the convicted Nazi leaders of the Main Trial. |
| 118316 | October 16 | Event | 1949 – Nikos Zachariadis, leader of the Communist Party of Greece, announces a "temporary cease-fire", effectively ending the Greek Civil War. |
| 118317 | October 16 | Event | 1949 – The diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic are established. |
| 118318 | October 16 | Event | 1951 – The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, is assassinated in Rawalpindi. |
| 118319 | October 16 | Event | 1964 – China detonates its first nuclear weapon. |
| 118320 | October 16 | Event | 1964 – Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin are inaugurated as General Secretary of the CPSU and Premier, respectively and the collective leadership is established. |