Something to think about.Something to discover.Something to remember.Every day.
⌕ My Time Capsule

Explore 14 March

Explore 14 March: Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin, Slovakia declares independence under German pressure, India’s first sound film opens in Bombay and a million people fill central Beirut. Meet Albert Einstein, Michael Caine and Simone Biles, born on this date.

This day through time →13 verified events across 4 eras

⌛13Full
Timeline ◈4Historic
Moments ♙8Born
Today ✦5Lives
Remembered ◉3Firsts &
Discoveries ♫2Culture
Stories ☉1Observances
Enslaved workers at an early roller cotton gin, as imagined by William L. Sheppard for Harper's Weekly in 1869.
Enslaved workers at an early roller cotton gin, as imagined by William L. Sheppard for Harper’s Weekly in 1869.
Image creditWilliam L. Sheppard · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1794

Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin

On 14 March 1794 the young inventor Eli Whitney received a United States patent for a machine that pulled the sticky seeds out of short-staple cotton. A task that had taken a worker a whole day for a pound or so of fibre could now be done many times faster.

The gin made upland cotton hugely profitable across the American South. Cotton output soared in the decades that followed, and so did the demand for land and for enslaved labour. Whitney himself made little from it, because his design was easily copied.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: US National Archives: Patent for Cotton Gin (1794) ↗
Jozef Tiso (right), president of the Slovak State, greeted by Adolf Hitler in October 1941.
Jozef Tiso (right), president of the Slovak State, greeted by Adolf Hitler in October 1941.
Image creditUnknown photographer · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1939

Slovakia declares independence under German pressure

On 13 March 1939 Hitler summoned the Slovak priest-politician Jozef Tiso to Berlin and told him to break away from Czechoslovakia or be left to the claims of Hungary and Poland. The next day, 14 March, the Slovak parliament in Bratislava voted for independence.

Within hours German troops moved into the Czech lands. The new Slovak State was a German client: it joined the Axis and deported tens of thousands of its Jewish citizens. The Slovak National Uprising of 1944 was a revolt against it.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: Czechoslovak history, the breakup of the republic ↗
The memorial shrine to Rafik Hariri in central Beirut, September 2005.
The memorial shrine to Rafik Hariri in central Beirut, September 2005.
Image creditst1ke · CC BY 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
2005

Up to a million people rally in Beirut

A month after the former prime minister Rafik Hariri was killed by a huge car bomb, crowds poured into Martyrs’ Square in Beirut on 14 March 2005. Estimates run up to a million people, the largest demonstration in Lebanon’s history.

Sunni, Christian, Druze and some Shia Lebanese marched together to demand that Syria withdraw the troops it had kept in Lebanon since 1976, and that Hariri’s killing be investigated. Syria completed its withdrawal that April. The movement became known as the Cedar Revolution, and its coalition took the name March 14.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Swarthmore College, Global Nonviolent Action Database: Lebanese campaign for democracy (Cedar Revolution), 2005 ↗
Flooding near Beira, Mozambique, on 19 March 2019, in false colour from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite.
Flooding near Beira, Mozambique, on 19 March 2019, in false colour from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite.
Image creditContains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2019), processed by ESA · CC BY-SA 3.0 igoResized and cropped for display.
2019

Cyclone Idai strikes Mozambique

Late on 14 March 2019 Tropical Cyclone Idai came ashore near the port city of Beira in Mozambique, bringing destructive winds. Beira, home to about half a million people, was cut off.

Days of torrential rain followed across Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi, flooding huge areas of farmland. More than a thousand people died across the region, making Idai one of the deadliest cyclones recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: UN OCHA via ReliefWeb: Mozambique, Cyclone Idai flash update no. 1, 15 March 2019 ↗
♙
PEOPLE

Born Today

Johann Strauss I
Image creditJosef Kriehuber · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1804

Johann Strauss I

Austrian composer of waltzes and the Radetzky March; father of the ‘Waltz King’.

Victor Emmanuel II
Image creditEugène Disdéri · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1820

Victor Emmanuel II

King of Sardinia who became the first king of a united Italy in 1861.

Paul Ehrlich
Image creditHarris & Ewing · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1854

Paul Ehrlich

German scientist who pioneered chemotherapy; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1908.

Albert Einstein
Image creditOren Jack Turner · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Born 1879

Albert Einstein

German-born physicist of relativity; Nobel Prize in Physics, 1921.

Quincy Jones
Image creditLos Angeles Times · CC BY 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1933

Quincy Jones

American composer and producer of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Michael Caine
Image creditManfred Werner / Tsui · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1933

Michael Caine

English actor of Zulu, The Italian Job and two Oscar-winning roles.

Aamir Khan
Image creditBollywood Hungama · CC BY 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1965

Aamir Khan

Indian actor and producer of Lagaan and 3 Idiots.

Simone Biles
Image creditOcoudis · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
Born 1997

Simone Biles

American gymnast, the most decorated in the sport’s history.

◉
IDEAS THAT CHANGED THINGS

Firsts, Science & Discoveries

Dorothy Hodgkin's molecular model of penicillin, made about 1945, at the Science Museum in London.
Dorothy Hodgkin’s molecular model of penicillin, made about 1945, at the Science Museum in London.
Image creditScience Museum London / Science and Society Picture Library · CC BY-SA 2.0Resized and cropped for display.
1942

Penicillin’s first American patient

In March 1942 Anne Miller, aged 33, lay close to death in New Haven Hospital in Connecticut with blood poisoning after a miscarriage. Her doctors obtained a few grams of the new, experimental drug penicillin, about half of all the supply in the United States at the time, and gave her the first dose on 14 March.

Her fever broke overnight and she recovered. She became the first American patient whose life was credited to penicillin, and lived to the age of 90. Her case helped spur the wartime drive to mass-produce the drug.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Yale School of Medicine: From penicillin to phages, Yale’s century-long fight against infection ↗
Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon Europe in 2014.
Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon Europe in 2014.
Image creditKrd (photo)Von Sprat (crop/extraction) · CC BY-SA 4.0Resized and cropped for display.
1994

Linux 1.0 is released

On 14 March 1994 the Finnish programmer Linus Torvalds released version 1.0 of the Linux kernel, the first he considered ready for everyday use. He had begun it as a student project in Helsinki almost three years before.

Released free under the GNU General Public License, and improved by volunteers around the world, Linux now runs most of the world’s web servers and supercomputers, and sits at the heart of Android phones.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Linux kernel archive: the v1.0 release tag ↗
The Soyuz TM-21 crew in 1994: Norman Thagard, Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov.
The Soyuz TM-21 crew in 1994: Norman Thagard, Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov.
Image creditNASA/Johnson Space Center · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1995

An American flies on a Russian rocket

On 14 March 1995 a Soyuz rocket lifted off from Baikonur in Kazakhstan carrying two Russian cosmonauts, Vladimir Dezhurov and Gennady Strekalov, and the NASA astronaut Norman Thagard. He was the first American to launch aboard a Russian spacecraft.

Two days later they docked with the Mir space station, where Thagard became the first American to live aboard. He stayed about 115 days, a US record at the time, and came home on the space shuttle Atlantis that July.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: NASA History: Mir-18 mission documentation ↗
♫
MUSIC • FILM • BOOKS • CULTURE

Culture Stories

An advertisement for Alam Ara at the Majestic Cinema in Bombay, March 1931.
An advertisement for Alam Ara at the Majestic Cinema in Bombay, March 1931.
Image creditImperial Film Company · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1931

India’s first sound film opens

On 14 March 1931 Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara opened at the Majestic Cinema in Bombay (now Mumbai). It was the first Indian feature film with sound, and crowds were so large that police had to control them.

The film had seven songs, setting the pattern for the song-filled films that still define Indian cinema. No print of Alam Ara is known to survive.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Press Institute of India (Vidura): Alam Ara, recalling India’s first talkie ↗
A poster by John Hassall for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's production of The Mikado, about 1897.
A poster by John Hassall for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company’s production of The Mikado, about 1897.
Image creditJohn Hassall · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
1885

The Mikado opens in London

On 14 March 1885 Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera The Mikado opened at the Savoy Theatre in London, with Arthur Sullivan conducting. Set in an imaginary Japan, it poked fun at very British habits and institutions.

It ran for 672 performances, one of the longest runs of any stage work up to that time, and within a year it was being staged by companies across Europe and America.

Read the full storyHistory & Timeline →Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica: The Mikado ↗
✦
LIVES REMEMBERED

Remembered Today

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock
Image creditJens Juel · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1803

Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

German poet of the religious epic The Messiah.

Karl Marx
Image creditJohn Jabez Edwin Mayall · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1883

Karl Marx

German philosopher and economist, author of Das Kapital and co-author of The Communist Manifesto.

Susan Hayward
Image credit20th Century Fox · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 1975

Susan Hayward

American actress; Oscar winner for I Want to Live!

Stephen Hawking
Image creditNASA · Public domainResized and cropped for display.
Died 2018

Stephen Hawking

British physicist of black holes and author of A Brief History of Time.

☉
AROUND THE WORLD

Observances & Anniversaries

A pie decorated with the symbol for pi, baked for Pi Day in 2011.
A pie decorated with the symbol for pi, baked for Pi Day in 2011.
Image creditMatman from Lublin · CC BY-SA 3.0Resized and cropped for display.
Annual

Pi Day and the International Day of Mathematics

Written the American way, 14 March is 3/14, the first digits of pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The physicist Larry Shaw began celebrating Pi Day at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1988.

In 2019 UNESCO proclaimed 14 March the International Day of Mathematics, first marked in 2020. By coincidence it is also Albert Einstein’s birthday.

Source: International Mathematical Union: UNESCO proclaims 14 March the International Day of Mathematics ↗
HISTORY & TIMELINE

Finished the highlights?

Follow 14 March chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the modern day, with 13 verified events and the sources behind them.

This day through time →
Sources & further reading