October 12 in History

Rodrigo de Triana aboard the Pinta spotted land at approximately 2 a.m. on October 12, 1492. Columbus had promised a silk doublet and a lifetime pension of 10,000 maravedis to whoever saw land first, but he claimed the reward himself, insisting he had seen a light the previous evening. The expedition landed on an island in the Bahamas, probably Watling Island, where they encountered the Lucayan Taino people. Columbus's journal entries from that first day describe the Taino as generous, naive, and ideal subjects for conversion and servitude. Within two years, he had established the encomienda system of forced labor. Within 50 years, the Taino population had collapsed from an estimated 250,000 to near zero through disease, slavery, and violence. The exchange of peoples, crops, and pathogens that followed reshaped every continent on earth.

Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen on October 12, 1810, and the citizens of Munich were invited to celebrate with horse races on a meadow outside the city gates. The meadow was named Theresienwiese in the bride's honor. The party was such a success that Munich decided to repeat it the following year, and the tradition grew. By the late 1800s, beer tents replaced horse racing as the main attraction. Today, Oktoberfest runs for 16 to 18 days ending the first Sunday in October, drawing over 6 million visitors annually who consume roughly 7.5 million liters of beer. Despite the name, most of the festival occurs in September. Only beer brewed within Munich city limits by six traditional breweries is permitted to be served.

Seventeen-year-old Otoya Yamaguchi charged across a television debate stage on October 12, 1960, and drove a traditional Japanese short sword into the abdomen of Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma. The attack happened on live television. A photographer named Yasushi Nagao captured the exact moment of the stabbing in a single frame that won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize. Asanuma died within minutes. Yamaguchi was a far-right ultranationalist who had targeted Asanuma for his pro-China socialist positions. Three weeks after his arrest, Yamaguchi hanged himself in his detention cell using strips torn from his bedsheets. He was 17 years old. The assassination shocked Japan and prompted an immediate overhaul of security protocols at public political events throughout the country.

Douglas Adams had been lying in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, drunk, staring at the stars, and holding a copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to Europe when the idea struck him. The radio series aired on BBC Radio 4 in 1978. The novel, published on October 12, 1979, expanded the story of Arthur Dent, the last surviving Englishman, who escapes Earth's demolition to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Adams turned science fiction inside out: the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42; the most useful item in the galaxy is a towel; the president's job is 'not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.' The book sold 14 million copies, spawned four sequels, a television series, a film, and a text adventure game. Adams died of a heart attack at 49, mid-sentence in his sixth novel.

Philip Drinker and Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr. built the first iron lung at Harvard in 1928, using an iron box, two vacuum cleaners, and a principle so simple it seemed obvious: if you couldn't breathe on your own, a machine could change air pressure around your chest to force your lungs to expand and contract. The first patient was a young girl at Boston Children's Hospital dying of respiratory paralysis from polio. She survived. During the polio epidemics of the 1940s and 1950s, entire hospital wards filled with rows of iron lungs, each containing a patient visible only from the neck up. At the peak in 1952, there were 1,200 iron lung patients in the United States alone. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine, introduced in 1955, eventually emptied those wards. A handful of survivors still use iron lungs today.

Two al-Qaeda operatives steered a small fiberglass boat loaded with 400 to 700 pounds of C-4 explosive alongside the USS Cole while the destroyer refueled in Aden harbor, Yemen, on October 12, 2000. The explosion tore a 40-by-60-foot hole in the ship's port side, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39. The Cole was nearly sunk; only the crew's damage control efforts kept it afloat. The attack was planned by Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri under Osama bin Laden's direction. An earlier attempt to bomb the USS The Sullivans in the same harbor had failed in January when the bombers' skiff sank under the weight of its explosives. The Cole attack exposed fundamental gaps in U.S. force protection and served as a direct precursor to the September 11 attacks eleven months later.