October 12

After defeating the Babylonian army at Opis, the Persians took Sippar and then, on the 16th of Tashritu, entered Babylon without battle, as the Nabonidus Chronicle puts it. Nabonidus was captured on his return.

Orléans was the last great town on the Loire that held for Charles VII. The English commander, the Earl of Salisbury, was mortally wounded by a cannon shot at a window of the Tourelles fort in the first weeks. His successors ringed the city with forts but never closed it off.

Land was sighted at 2 a.m. by Rodrigo de Triana on the Pinta. Columbus claimed the promised reward for himself, saying he had seen a light the evening before. The Taíno called the island Guanahani; which island it was is still argued, but San Salvador is the favourite.

The old Dundee whaler left London on 1 June and Cardiff, which had given generously in money and coal, on 15 June. She too called at Funchal, on 23 June, then at South Trinidad and Simon’s Town, where Scott came aboard for the run to Melbourne.

A telegram was waiting when the Terra Nova reached Melbourne. Cherry-Garrard remembered it as “Madeira. Am going South. AMUNDSEN.” The Fram Museum gives the text Leon Amundsen sent from Christiania on 3 October as “Beg leave to inform you Fram proceeding Antarctic. Amundsen.”

To beat Gemini’s two-man flights, three cosmonauts were squeezed into a modified Vostok with no spacesuits and no ejection seats. By the time they landed the next day, Khrushchev, who had pushed for the stunt, was being removed from power.

The first Games in Latin America, at 2,240 metres. Enriqueta Basilio became the first woman to light the cauldron, and Dick Fosbury won the high jump going over backwards.

In a small white house by the sea, Reagan and Gorbachev came close to agreeing to abolish all their nuclear weapons. It broke down over Reagan’s missile shield, but both men left knowing the other was serious.

Nicolas Sarkozy gathered the leaders of the fifteen euro countries at the Élysée, with Gordon Brown as guest. They adopted the British plan: guarantees for bank borrowing and public money for bank capital.

From April 2005 the Pacific centre and the Japan Meteorological Agency issued interim advisories for the Indian Ocean, while UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission coordinated a system of the ocean's own: seismic stations, deep-ocean buoys and tide gauges linked to national warning…

Australia, India and Indonesia became the regional tsunami service providers, and the interim service from Hawaii and Japan ended. The same day an exercise, IOWave11, tested the system against a repeat of 2004.