October 25: Picasso Is Born, the Microwave Arrives, and a Cabinet Member Goes to Prison Three October 25ths defined by transformation — of how we see art, how we cook dinner, and how we understand the obligations of public office Every transformation begins with someone deciding that the existing arrangement is not the only possible one. A child in Málaga, Spain, born with a gift for drawing that his father recognized almost immediately, would grow into an artist who dismantled Western painting's assumptions about perspective, form, and representation so thoroughly that the word "Cubism" entered the language to describe what he had done. A Massachusetts engineer, working with technology developed to detect enemy aircraft, realized that the same waves that cooked a chocolate bar in his pocket could cook food in a kitchen — and the microwave oven was born. And in a Washington, D.C. courtroom, a jury decided that a member of a president's cabinet who traded public resources for private cash was a criminal, not simply a politician. October 25 belongs to all three kinds of transformation. Málaga, 1881   On October 25, 1881, Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, on the southern coast of Spain, to José Ruiz Blasco, an art teacher and painter, and María Picasso López. The full name recorded at his baptism ran to twenty-three words — Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso — a litany of saints and family members that he would eventually reduce to the maternal surname that has become one of the most recognizable in human history. His father recognized his son's gift early and gave him formal training in classical technique; by thirteen, Picasso had passed the entrance examination for the School of Fine Arts in Barcelona with a proficiency that shocked the admissions board. He had completed in a single day a test they allowed a full month to finish. The mastery of traditional technique that Picasso demonstrated as a teenager gave him the foundation to dismantle it with authority. Cubism — developed with Georges Braque beginning around 1907 and most fully realized in works like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and Guernica — fractured the single viewpoint that Western painting had operated from since the Renaissance and replaced it with multiple simultaneous perspectives, showing objects from several angles at once and making the viewer aware that representation itself is a choice. It was the most radical departure from pictorial convention in five hundred years, and it came from a man who had first mastered the convention so completely that he could not be accused of failing to understand what he was abandoning. Picasso lived until 1973 and produced an estimated 20,000 works. The child born in Málaga on October 25, 1881 produced more art than any other artist in recorded history — and changed what art could be more thoroughly than almost any of them.   Málaga, Spain — the city where Pablo Picasso was born on October 25, 1881, and where the art world's most consequential career began in a modest apartment on the Plaza de la Merced. The Accidental Oven On October 25, 1955, the Tappan Company introduced the first domestic microwave oven for sale to American consumers — the RL-1, priced at $1,295 and roughly the size of a conventional range. The technology that powered it had been discovered entirely by accident. In 1945, Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon working on radar systems, noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted while he was standing near an active magnetron — the device that generates microwave radiation. Intrigued, he tested the effect deliberately on popcorn and then on an egg, which exploded. He filed a patent for a "method of treating foodstuffs" using microwave radiation, and Raytheon introduced the first commercial microwave oven — the Radarange — in 1947. It stood five and a half feet tall, weighed 750 pounds, and cost between $2,000 and $3,000. It was marketed to restaurants and institutions, not homes. The Tappan RL-1 of 1955 was the first attempt to bring the technology to domestic kitchens, and at $1,295 — roughly $14,000 in today's dollars — it found a very limited audience. But the direction was set. Over the following three decades, miniaturization and manufacturing improvements brought the price down and the size down with it, and by 1975 more microwave ovens were being sold in the United States than gas ranges. Today there is a microwave oven in approximately ninety percent of American homes, used to reheat leftovers, defrost proteins, and make the popcorn that Percy Spencer's discovery first produced by accident in a Massachusetts laboratory. The device that changed how billions of people prepare food began with an engineer, a magnetron, and a melted candy bar. The American kitchen of the 1950s — the domestic space that the microwave oven was about to enter and permanently transform. ❦ Teapot Dome   On October 25, 1929, Albert B. Fall, who had served as Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, was convicted of bribery in a Washington, D.C. courtroom — becoming the first cabinet member in American history to be found guilty of a crime committed while in office. Fall had used his position to transfer control of two naval petroleum reserves — Teapot Dome in Wyoming and Elk Hills in California — from the Navy Department to his own Interior Department, and had then leased them to private oil companies in exchange for payments that totaled more than $400,000. The arrangement was made without competitive bidding, in secret, and with the apparent acquiescence of a president who either did not know or did not want to know what his Interior Secretary was doing. Harding died in office in 1923, before the scandal fully unraveled. The Senate investigation that eventually exposed the Teapot Dome scandal took years and was resisted at every turn by the Harding administration's allies. Fall was ultimately sentenced to one year in prison and a $100,000 fine — one of the oilmen who had bribed him, Edward Doheny, was acquitted of paying the bribe in a separate trial, a verdict that produced one of legal history's more notable ironies: the man who took the bribe went to prison while the man who paid it went free. Teapot Dome remained the benchmark for presidential administration corruption for fifty years, until Watergate redefined the term. It established the principle, at some cost, that no position in American government — however powerful, however politically connected — placed its holder above the law. Fall served his prison term in ill health. He died in 1944, having spent his last years in poverty. The oil fields that made him a criminal produced wealth for their new owners for decades.   The Wyoming high desert oil fields at the heart of the Teapot Dome scandal — public resources that a cabinet secretary sold in secret for personal gain, and that a Senate investigation eventually brought to light.

October 25: Meghan Markle Responds to Allegations Against Her Father Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, has spoken out about a report containing serious allegations against her estranged father, Thomas Markle, who denies them. Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, said Friday that she was “deeply distressed” after a British newspaper published allegations that her estranged father, Thomas Markle Sr., possessed child sexual abuse images. Markle Sr., 82, has denied the allegations. News reports have not indicated that he has been charged with any crime. A Statement and a Denial   The allegations were first published Thursday by The Sun, which reported claims made by Meghan Markle’s half-brother, Thomas Markle Jr., 60. He told the paper that he had found material on his father’s devices and reported it to authorities, including the FBI. The Sun reported that the FBI had confirmed receiving his sworn statement. The FBI has not publicly commented on whether an investigation is underway. In an interview with the Daily Mail, Markle Sr. denied the allegations and called them “sick lies.” In her statement, Meghan said her thoughts were with “any children who may have been harmed.” She also said that in 2018 a letter containing “troubling and disturbing allegations” about her father was sent to London’s Metropolitan Police and the royal protection unit, that the letter was later shared with her, and that she was assured the claims were being investigated. She said she had trusted that the authorities were doing the same for other families. The Metropolitan Police had not publicly responded to her account at the time of reporting.   The allegations remain unproven, and Thomas Markle Sr. has denied them. Meghan and her father have been estranged since shortly before her 2018 wedding to Prince Harry. He withdrew from the ceremony after it emerged that he had arranged staged paparazzi photos, and King Charles, then Prince of Wales, walked her down the aisle instead. Markle Sr. and his son have both spoken to the press many times since then. Many questions remain unanswered, including whether any authority is actively investigating the claims. This is a developing story, and the allegations have not been proven.

On October 25, 2004, the Boston Red Sox Opened the World Series With a Wild, High-Scoring Win A slugfest in St. Louis marked the first step toward the end of an 86-year championship drought. On October 25, 2004, the Boston Red Sox took the field in St. Louis for Game 1 of the World Series carrying the weight of eighty-six years without a title. What followed was less a pitchers' duel than a demolition derby, and by the time the dust settled, Boston had a lead in a series that would end a curse decades in the making. The Slugfest   The Red Sox had just dispatched the New York Yankees in a historic ALCS comeback from a three-games-to-none deficit, and they carried that momentum into Busch Stadium against the St. Louis Cardinals, owners of the best record in baseball. Game 1 was sloppy and chaotic, with both teams combining for six errors and twenty runs. Boston's offense, anchored by Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz, jumped out early and never fully relinquished control, even as St. Louis clawed back repeatedly. Reliever Curt Schilling wasn't on the mound that night, but the Red Sox bullpen held on through a bizarre, error-filled affair that felt more like a battle of attrition than a showcase of World Series polish. When it ended, the scoreboard read 11-9, an oddly fitting number for a franchise whose recent history had rarely been tidy either. The final score made it the highest-scoring World Series opener since 1932, and it set the tone for a series defined by momentum rather than pitching precision. Boston would go on to sweep St. Louis in four games, completing a championship run that erased the so-called Curse of the Bambino, the supposed hex traced back to the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1920. Fans who had waited generations for a title watched a team that stumbled its way into greatness, three errors and all, prove that history doesn't always break cleanly—sometimes it just breaks.