Explore 23 January

Explore 23 January: the deadliest earthquake on record strikes northern China, Elizabeth Blackwell becomes the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, North Korea seizes the American spy ship Pueblo and a volcano erupts on the edge of an Icelandic fishing town. Meet Stendhal, Édouard Manet and Django Reinhardt, born on 23 January.

This day through time →8 verified events across 3 eras

⌛8Full
Timeline ◈4Historic
Moments ♙6Born
Today ✦4Lives
Remembered ◉1Firsts &
Discoveries

Cave houses dug into the soft loess of Shanxi province, the kind of homes that collapsed in 1556.

Image credit

Meier&Poehlmann · CC BY 3.0Resized and cropped for display.

1556

The deadliest earthquake on record strikes northern China

In the Wei River valley of Ming China, millions of people lived in yaodong, cave homes cut into the soft, wind-laid soil called loess. They were warm in winter and cool in summer, but they could not stand a great earthquake.

Early on 23 January 1556 an earthquake of perhaps magnitude 8 struck Shaanxi and neighbouring Shanxi province. The cave homes collapsed on their sleeping families, landslides buried villages and fires burned for days. About 830,000 people are believed to have died, the highest toll of any earthquake in recorded history.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Shaanxi province earthquake of 1556 ↗

Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., photographed by Ernest Edwards about 1860.

Image credit

Ernest Edwards · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1849

Elizabeth Blackwell becomes the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States

Elizabeth Blackwell, born in Bristol and raised in the United States, applied to twelve medical schools in the north-eastern states and was accepted by only one. At Geneva Medical College in New York the faculty let the all-male students vote on her admission, and they voted yes, apparently as a joke.

On 23 January 1849 she received her degree of Doctor of Medicine, first in her class, the first woman to do so in the United States. Barred from most hospitals, she opened a dispensary in New York with her sister Emily, later a hospital and a medical college for women, and she became the first woman on the British medical register.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Library of Medicine: Changing the Face of Medicine, Dr Elizabeth Blackwell ↗

The US Navy intelligence ship Pueblo off San Diego in October 1967, three months before her capture.

Image credit

U.S. Navy · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1968

North Korea seizes the American spy ship Pueblo

USS Pueblo was a small, lightly armed US Navy ship fitted to collect radio and radar signals. In January 1968 she was sent to watch the coast of North Korea near the port of Wonsan.

On 23 January North Korean patrol boats and fighter aircraft surrounded her in waters the United States said were international, opened fire and boarded her. One sailor was killed and the other 82 crew were taken prisoner. They were held for eleven months and beaten before their release in December. North Korea kept the ship, which is now a museum in Pyongyang, and she remains a commissioned US Navy vessel.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Naval History and Heritage Command: H-014-1, the seizure of USS Pueblo (AGER-2) ↗

Ash rises from the new volcano behind the town of Vestmannaeyjar in 1973; in front, the pumps that sprayed sea water on the lava.

Image credit

Photo by Jack Lockwood, 1973 (U.S. Geological Survey). · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1973

A volcano erupts on the edge of an Icelandic fishing town

Heimaey, off the south coast of Iceland, was home to the country’s most important fishing port. In the early hours of 23 January 1973 a fissure split open on the edge of the town and began spraying lava and ash. Almost all of the island’s 5,000 people were taken off by the fishing fleet that same night.

Over the next five months the new volcano, Eldfell, buried hundreds of houses, and lava crept towards the harbour mouth. Islanders and scientists pumped sea water onto the flow, cooling and slowing it, and the harbour was saved. Most residents came home, and the eruption left the harbour better sheltered than before.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US Geological Survey: Man against volcano, the eruption on Heimaey, Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland ↗

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PEOPLE

Born Today

Image credit

Olof Johan Södermark · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1783

Stendhal

French novelist of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma.

Image credit

Nadar / Adam Cuerden · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1832

Édouard Manet

French painter of Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a bridge to Impressionism.

Image credit

Nobel Foundation archive · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1907

Hideki Yukawa

Japanese physicist who predicted the meson and became Japan’s first Nobel laureate, in 1949.

Image credit

William P. Gottlieb / Adam Cuerden · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1910

Django Reinhardt

Belgian-born Romani jazz guitarist who played brilliantly with two fingers of his left hand.

Image credit

Mario De Biasi (1923–2013) · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

Born 1928

Jeanne Moreau

French actress of Jules et Jim.

Image credit

Bert Nienhuis · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.

Born 1930

Derek Walcott

Saint Lucian poet of Omeros, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature.

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IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

The bathyscaphe Trieste in heavy seas off Guam just before her record dive, 23 January 1960.

Image credit

Unknown · Public domainResized and cropped for display.

1960

Two men reach the deepest point of the ocean

The bathyscaphe Trieste, designed by the Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard, was a steel sphere for two people hung beneath a float filled with petrol, which is lighter than water and does not compress. The US Navy bought her in 1958 and fitted a stronger sphere.

On 23 January 1960 Piccard’s son Jacques and Lieutenant Don Walsh of the US Navy sank to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, nearly 11,000 metres down, after almost five hours’ descent. The water pressure there is more than a thousand times that at the surface. No one returned to the Challenger Deep for 52 years.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Naval History and Heritage Command: H-041-6, Bathyscaphe Trieste’s deep dive ↗

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LIVES REMEMBERED