Explore 14 December

Explore 14 December: five Norwegians plant a flag at the South Pole, George Washington dies at Mount Vernon, Max Planck puts a number on the quantum and the Bosnian war is signed away in Paris. Meet Tycho Brahe, Nostradamus and George VI, born on this date.

This day through time →11 verified events across 5 eras

⌛11Full
Timeline ◈4Historic
Moments ♙8Born
Today ✦5Lives
Remembered ◉2Firsts &
Discoveries

Roald Amundsen in polar furs.

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AnonymousUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1911

Amundsen reaches the South Pole

On 14 December 1911 Roald Amundsen and four companions — Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel and Oscar Wisting — became the first people to stand at the South Pole. They had left the Bay of Whales on 19 October with four sledges and fifty-two dogs, and had been favoured by good weather.

They pitched a tent they called Polheim, left a letter for the king of Norway, and started back on 17 December, reaching base on 25 January 1912. Robert Falcon Scott’s party arrived at the Pole thirty-four days after Amundsen, found the tent, and died on the way home.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Roald Amundsen ↗

George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart.

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Gilbert Stuart · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1799

George Washington dies at Mount Vernon

George Washington died between ten and eleven o’clock on the night of 14 December 1799, at Mount Vernon, less than three years after leaving the presidency. He had spent the previous day riding round the estate in sleet and snow and woke in the small hours struggling to breathe; the diagnosis now generally accepted is acute bacterial epiglottitis.

His doctors bled him repeatedly, induced vomiting and applied blistering compounds — the standard treatment of the day, and almost certainly a hastening of the end. He was buried at Mount Vernon on 18 December, having asked in his will that his enslaved workers be freed on his wife’s death.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: George Washington’s Mount Vernon: the death of George Washington ↗

The signing ceremony for the Dayton peace agreement.

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U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Brian Schlumbohm · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1995

The Dayton Agreement is signed in Paris

The presidents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia signed the General Framework Agreement for Peace in Paris on 14 December 1995, ending three and a half years of war in Bosnia — the bloodiest conflict in Europe since 1945. The terms had been hammered out the previous month at an air force base near Dayton, Ohio, under the American negotiator Richard Holbrooke.

The country stayed whole but was split into two entities, a Croat-Bosniak federation on 51 per cent of the territory and a Serb republic on the rest, with a 60,000-strong international force to hold the line. The settlement stopped the fighting; the constitutional machinery it created is still in place, and still argued over.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Dayton Accords ↗

United Nations headquarters in New York.

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Kidfly182 · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

1955

Sixteen countries join the United Nations at once

On 14 December 1955 the United Nations admitted sixteen new members in a single day: Albania, Jordan, Ireland, Portugal, Hungary, Italy, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Ceylon, Nepal, Libya, Cambodia, Laos and Spain. Membership jumped from sixty to seventy-six.

It was a package deal. For most of a decade the Cold War veto had kept applicants out in both directions, with the Soviet Union blocking Western-aligned states and the West blocking Soviet-aligned ones. Pairing four communist states with twelve others was the only way through, and it opened the way for the wave of newly independent African and Asian members that followed.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: United Nations: growth in United Nations membership ↗

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PEOPLE

Born Today

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César de Notre-Dame · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1503

Nostradamus

French physician and astrologer whose cryptic quatrains have been read as prophecy for four and a half centuries.

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Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1546

Tycho Brahe

Danish astronomer whose naked-eye observations, the most accurate ever made, gave Kepler the data for his laws.

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Unknown photographer · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1883

Morihei Ueshiba

Japanese martial artist who founded aikido.

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Matson Photo Service · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1895

George VI

King of the United Kingdom from his brother’s abdication in 1936 until his death in 1952.

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Studio Harcourt · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1895

Paul Éluard

French surrealist poet whose wartime poem Liberté was dropped over occupied France by the RAF.

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Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1946

Jane Birkin

English actress and singer who made her life in France, and after whom the Hermès Birkin bag is named.

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Grace Lyons-management · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1946

Patty Duke

American actress who won an Oscar at sixteen for playing Helen Keller, and later campaigned on mental health.

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David Seow · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.

Born 1979

Michael Owen

English footballer, European Footballer of the Year in 2001, remembered for his goal against Argentina at eighteen.

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IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

Max Planck.

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Hugo Erfurth · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1900

Planck reads the paper that starts quantum theory

On 14 December 1900, at a meeting of the German Physical Society in Berlin, Max Planck presented the derivation of his law for the radiation given off by a hot body. To make the mathematics come out, he had to assume that energy was emitted not in a continuous stream but in discrete packets, proportional to frequency by a new constant he called h.

Planck thought of it as a formal trick and spent years trying to do without it. It was Einstein in 1905 who took the quantum seriously as physics. The date is usually given as the birthday of quantum theory.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Max Planck ↗

A Mariner 2 spacecraft in the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

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Eric Long/Smithsonian · CC0Resized and cropped for display.

1962

Mariner 2 reaches Venus

Mariner 2 passed within about 35,000 kilometres of Venus on 14 December 1962, the first spacecraft to reach another planet and send data home. In a forty-two-minute scan its microwave and infrared radiometers found surface temperatures of well over 200°C on both the day and night sides, and a cloud deck some 56 to 80 kilometres up.

The hope that Venus might be a warm, wet twin of the Earth died that afternoon. On the way there Mariner 2 had also confirmed the existence of the solar wind.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NASA: 60 years ago, Mariner 2 first to explore Venus ↗

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LIVES REMEMBERED