On This Day In History – March 14

Birthdays

• 1879 Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate (theory of relativity), born in Ulm, German Empire (d. 1955)

Events

• 1592 “Ultimate Pi day”: on this day at 6.53am is the largest correspondence between calendar dates and significant digits of pi, since the introduction of the Julian calendar (3.141592653)

• 1644 England grants patent for Providence Plantations (now Rhode Island)
• 1794 Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin machine revolutionizing the cotton industry in the southern US states
• 1801 Henry Addington becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after his friend William Pitt the Younger resigns after being unable to persuade King George III of the need for Catholic Emancipation
• 1889 German Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents his “Navigable Balloon”

• 1900 US currency goes on gold standard after Congress passes the Currency Act
• 1904 In a landmark case, Northern Securities Company v United States, the US Supreme Court finds the company has violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act; first case in T. Roosevelt’s ‘trust-busting’ campaign
• 1907 By Presidential order, Japanese laborers are excluded from entering the USA
• 1913 John D. Rockefeller gives $100 million [$2.533 billion in 2019 dollars] to Rockefeller Foundation

• 1923 US President Warren G. Harding becomes 1st president to pay taxes
• 1958 South Africa’s government prohibits the African National Congress
• 1964 Dallas, Texas; Jack Ruby sentenced to death for Lee Harvey Oswald’s murder
• 1971 The Rolling Stones leave England for France to escape taxes
• 1973 Future US senator John McCain is released after spending over five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp

• 1983 OPEC cut oil prices for 1st time in 23 years
• 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev becomes president of the Soviet Congress
• 2013 Xi Jinping is named as the new President of the People’s Republic of China

• 2017 World’s oldest golf club Muirfield in Scotland, votes to admit women as members for 1st time in 273 years
• 2018 NASA twin study finds that Scott Kelly is no longer identical to his twin brother after one year in space, 7% of his genes altered
• 2018 Angela Merkel sworn in for fourth term as German Chancellor, head of a coalition government, 171 days after the general election