Twelve people were killed in an apartment-building collapse in Medellín, leading to new construction laws being passed in Colombia.
Source12 October 1901
A Saturday in history
Weekday
Saturday
Season
Autumn (N. Hemisphere)
Century
20th century
Records
453
- 2013
- 1992
An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 or 5.9 struck south of Cairo, Egypt, killing 545 people.
Source
1984The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, in a failed attempt to assassinate British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.
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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.
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1978While in prison for murder, boxer James Scott defeated Eddie "The Flame" Gregory, a leading light heavyweight.
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1960Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev reportedly pounded his shoe on a desk during a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in protest at a speech by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.
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1960Japan Socialist Party leader Inejirō Asanuma (pictured) was assassinated during a live television recording by a far-right ultra-nationalist using a short sword.
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1946Il Canto degli Italiani is adopted as national anthem by the newly formed Italian Republic.
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1933The United States Department of Justice acquired a military prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, to be transformed into the last-resort Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.
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1928The iron lung (example pictured), a type of medical ventilator, was used for the first time at the Boston Children's Hospital to treat an eight-year-old girl paralyzed by polio.
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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.
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1898A statue of Austin Blair (pictured) was dedicated in a ceremony that attracted up to 30,000 people to Lansing, Michigan.
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1892The Pledge of Allegiance of the United States was first used in public schools to coincide with the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Source- 1890
The Uddevalla Suffrage Association was founded in Uddevalla, Sweden, with the purpose of bringing about universal suffrage.
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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.
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1798The Peasants' War began in Overmere, Southern Netherlands, with peasants taking up arms against the French occupiers.
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1492Believing he had reached the East Indies, Christopher Columbus made landfall on an island in the Caribbean, sparking a series of events that led to the European colonization of the Americas.
Source- 1406
Chen Yanxiang, the only person from Indonesia known to have visited dynastic Korea, reached Seoul after having set out from Java four months before.
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Photo archive
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