📜 This Day in History

October 12

• 1406Chen Yanxiang, the only person from Indonesia known to have visited dynastic Korea, reached Seoul four months after leaving Java.
• 1799Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin became the first woman to make a parachute descent, falling 900 metres (3,000 ft) in the gondola of a hot air balloon.
• 1917First World War: New Zealand troops suffered more than 2,000 casualties, including more than 800 deaths, in the First Battle of Passchendaele, making it the nation's largest loss of life in one day.
• 1946Il Canto degli Italiani is adopted as national anthem by the newly formed Italian Republic.
• 1979Typhoon Tip, the largest and most intense tropical cyclone ever recorded, reached a worldwide record-low sea-level pressure of 870 mbar (25.69 inHg) in the western Pacific Ocean.
• 2013Twelve people were killed in an apartment-building collapse in Medellín, leading to new construction laws being passed in Colombia.

Born on this day

• 1537Edward VI, king of England (died 1553)
• 1896Eugenio Montale, Italian poet and translator, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1981)
• 1935Luciano Pavarotti, Italian tenor and actor (died 2007)
• 1968Hugh Jackman, Australian actor, singer, and producer