On This Day 2026
Hello, … and welcome to day 73 of the year.

Saturday, March 14th

Today is National Write Your Story Day, Save a Spider Day, International Day of Mathematics and Genius Day. Your star sign is Pisces and your birthstone is Aquamarine.
1945 – The 617 Dambuster Squadron of the RAF dropped the heaviest bomb of the war (the 22,000-pound “Grand Slam”) on the Bielefeld railway viaduct in Germany.
The 617 Dambuster Squadron of the RAF dropped the heaviest bomb of the war (the 22,000-pound "Grand Slam") on the Bielefeld railway viaduct in Germany.
Today’s birthdays
1933 – Michael Caine (93), English retired actor (Zulu, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Italian Job, Escape to Victory), born in St Olave’s Hospital, London.
1947 – Jona Lewie (79), English singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist (“You’ll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties”, “Stop the Cavalry”), born in Southampton.
1948 – Billy Crystal (78), American actor (When Harry Met Sally, City Slickers, Analyze This), born in Manhattan, New York, United States.
1945 – Jasper Carrot (81), English comedian (Canned Carrott) and television presenter (Golden Balls), born in Acocks Green, Birmingham.
1956 – Tessa Sanderson (70), British former javelin thrower (Summer Olympics from 1976 to 1996 winning gold in 1984), born in St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica.
1979 – Nicolas Anelka (47), French professional football manager and retired player (Arsenal, Manchester City, Chelsea), born in Le Chesnay, Le Chesnay-Rocquencourt, France.
1983 – Taylor Hanson (43), American musician and member of pop rock band Hanson (“MMMBop”), born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States.
1986 – Jamie Bell (40), English actor (Billy Elliot), for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, born in Billingham, County Durham.
Famous deaths
1883 – Karl Marx (b. 1818), German philosopher, social and political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist.

2014 – Tony Benn (b. 1925), English politician, Postmaster General of the United Kingdom.

2018 – Jim Bowen (b. 1937), English stand-up comedian and host of the ITV game show Bullseye, which he presented from its beginning in 1981 to 1995.
2018 – Stephen Hawking (b. 1942), English physicist, author and former director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.
The day today
1942 – Anne Miller became the first American civilian successfully treated with penicillin at New Haven Hospital in Connecticut. Near death from septicemia (blood poisoning) following a miscarriage, she was saved after receiving roughly half of the entire U.S. supply of the drug at the time. The first person to be treated in the UK was Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old police constable on 12 February 1941.

1945 – The 617 Dambuster Squadron of the RAF dropped the heaviest bomb of the war (the 22,000-pound “Grand Slam”) on the Bielefeld railway viaduct in Germany. It was nicknamed ‘Ten Ton Tess’ and was designed by Barnes Wallis, who also designed the earlier ‘bouncing bomb’. Bielefeld is now twinned with many European towns including Enniskillen in Northern Ireland and Rochdale in Lancashire.

1960 – The Government announced plans for a Thames Barrier to protect London from flooding. The Thames Barrier and Flood Prevention Act was passed in 1972, with construction beginning in 1974.
1960 – Jodrell Bank’s radio telescope in Cheshire set a new record, making contact with the American Pioneer V satellite at a distance of 407,000 miles. The previous record was 290,000 miles. This accomplishment made Jodrell Bank the only facility capable of tracking the probe at such distances, with hopes of reaching up to 50 million miles. The Jodrell Bank telescope, which became operational in 1957, was the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope at the time.

1961 – The New English Bible was published. This marked a radical step forward in the expression of the biblical text in contemporary English.

1964 – Nightclub owner Jack Ruby was convicted of “murder with malice” for the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, had been shot and mortally wounded by Ruby on November 24, 1963, while in police custody, two days after the assassination.
1966 – Born Free, a British drama film starring the real-life couple Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers as Joy and George Adamson is released, winning two Academy Awards for Best Original Song and Best Original Music Score.
1967 – US President John F. Kennedy’s body was moved to its final resting place in Virginia. The ill-fated President had been temporarily interred in Arlington National Cemetery shortly after his assassination in 1963. It wasn’t until 1967 that the official burial site was completed, just a few feet away from where he had first been buried. The re-interment was held in secret, and a private ceremony was held for JFK’s widow, brothers, and President Lyndon Johnson.
1984 – Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams was shot and wounded in a loyalist paramilitary assassination attempt in central Belfast. Gunmen from the Ulster Freedom Fighters fired roughly 20 shots into his car, striking Adams in the neck, shoulder, and arm, though he survived after emergency surgery.
1986 – The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Giotto probe achieved a historic, close-range flyby of Halley’s Comet, passing within roughly 596 to 600 kilometers (approximately 370 miles) of the nucleus. This mission provided the first-ever close-up images of a comet’s nucleus.

1991 – The ‘Birmingham Six’ were freed from jail after 16 years when their convictions for the murder of 21 people in two pubs were quashed by the Court of Appeal.

1995 – The population of space hit a new record with 13 astronauts involving the crew of the Mir Space Station, the Soyuz TM-21 mission, and Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-67). This milestone was later repeated in July 2009 with 13 people on the International Space Station (ISS).
2014 – Thieves who had built a 50ft (15m) tunnel to a cash machine on Liverpool Road, Eccles, got away with more than £80,000. The complex nature of its structure could have taken months to excavate and echoes a similar raid in Fallowfield Shopping Precinct in January 2012.
2015 – Britain’s biggest ever cruise ship, the 141,000-ton Britannia, (which was officially named by Her Majesty The Queen in Southampton) set off on its maiden voyage; a 14 night cruise around the Mediterranean.
2017 – Muirfield, the historic Scottish golf club, voted to admit women members for the first time in its 273-year history. The club, which had previously only allowed women to play as guests, was removed from the Open Championship venue list in 2016 due to its men-only policy.
2018 – The UK announces it will expel 23 Russian diplomats after Moscow refused to explain how a Russian-made nerve agent was used on a former spy and his daughter in Salisbury on on 4 March. Moscow refused to meet Theresa May’s midnight deadline to co-operate in the case, prompting May to announce a series of measures intended to send a “clear message” to Russia.
2018 – Identical twins were no longer identical after one returned from a mission to space. Astronaut Scott Kelly spent one year in space, and upon his return, NASA found his genes had changed by 7% compared to his identical twin brother, Mark, who remained on Earth

2018 – Finland became the world’s happiest country. The World Happiness Report change meant Norway slipped into second place, while Burundi was classed as the unhappiest country in the world.

2023 – OpenAI released GPT-4, an upgraded version of their popular artificial intelligence chatbot. Unlike its predecessor GPT-3.5, which was text-only, GPT-4 can process and analyze both text and image inputs.
2023 – The US, UK and Australia unveil details of their AUKUS deal to create a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines to be based in the Indo Pacific region to counter Chinese military.

2024 – Archaeologists identified the wreckage of the HMS Tyger, a 50-gun British warship that ran aground in 1742 and sank off Garden Key in the Dry Tortugas (Key West, Florida). On January 13, 1742, the 4th-rate frigate ran aground on a reef. The crew subsequently burned the ship to prevent it from being captured by Spanish forces.

Today in music
1963 – Gerry and the Pacemakers released their first British single, “How Do You Do It?” a song the Beatles had rejected. Their biggest hit was “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, from the musical Carousel, which has been the adopted anthem of Liverpool Football Club since the mid 1960s.
1963 – Cliff Richard and The Shadows were at No.1 on the UK singles chart with ‘Summer Holiday.’ Taken from the film of the same name, it became Richards’ seventh UK No.1 single.
1964 – For the first time in British recording history, all Top Ten singles in the UK were by British acts. No.1 was ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’ by Cilla Black, No.2 – ‘Bits and Pieces’ by The Dave Clark Five, No.3 – ‘Little Children’ by Billy J Kramer, No.4 – ‘Diane’ by The Bachelors, No.5 – ‘Not Fade Away’ by The Rolling Stones, No.6 – ‘Just One Look’ by The Hollies, No.7 – ‘Needles and Pins’ by The Searchers, No.8 – ‘I Think Of You’ by The Merseybeats, No.9 – ‘Boys Cry’ by Eden Kane, and No. 10 – ‘Let Me Go Lover’ by Kathy Kirby.
1968 – The promotional film for The Beatles ‘Lady Madonna’ was broadcast in black and white on Top Of The Pops on UK television. The video portion of the film clip was shot while the group were performing the song ‘Hey Bulldog’, but the ‘Lady Madonna’ audio track was paired with the video for the promo release.
1973 – ABBA released ‘Ring Ring’ the title track of their debut album. It gave the group their first appearance on the UK singles chart where it peaked at No.32 and became their first Swedish No.1 and first Australian top 10 hit.
1978 – Blondie were at No.2 on the UK chart with their version of the Randy & the Rainbows song ‘Denis’, kept off the No.1 position by Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’.
1985 – Dead Or Alive were kicked off the UK music television show The Tube after admitting they were incapable of playing ‘live.’ The group scored the 1985 UK No.1 single ‘You Spin Me Round, Like A Record’.
1987 – Boy George scored his first UK No.1 single as a solo artist with the David Gates song ‘Everything I Own’. Originally recorded by Gates’s band Bread for their 1972 album Baby, I’m a Want You, the song was also a UK No.1 for Ken Boothe in 1974.
1991 – R.E.M. played the first of two nights at London’s Borderline Club under the name of ‘Bingo Hand Job.’ The group were in the UK promoting their seventh studio album Out of Time and their current single ‘Losing My Religion’.
1995 – Tupac (2Pac) Shakur became the first male solo artist to have a No.1 album in the US while incarcerated. His third LP, Me Against the World came out while the controversial West Coast rapper was serving eight months in prison.
1999 – Stereophonics went to No.1 on the UK album chart with Performance And Cocktails’ becoming only the third Welsh band to score a No.1 album and the first No.1 album for Richard Branson’s V2 label.
2005 – Michael Jackson was blasted by British Army veterans for wearing military badges while on trail for child abuse. The singer had appeared in court on most days with either an Army motif on his breast pocket or a cap badge tied around his neck.
2021 – Beyoncé won her 28th Grammy Award, breaking the world record for most Grammys won by an artist. Billie Eilish won her second consecutive Record of the Year award for ‘Everything I Wanted’, while Taylor Swift won her third Album of the Year award for Folklore.
2022 – Dolly Parton attempted to refuse a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nomination. Despite her refusal, the hall kept the nomination in place, and she was ultimately voted in. Coming to terms with the decision, Dolly Parton accepted her induction simply because it was something her fans wanted.
Today in history
1757 – British admiral John Byng was court-martialled and executed by firing squad on board HMS Monarch at Plymouth, for “failing to do his utmost” to relieve Minorca from the French fleet following the Battle of Minorca. In practice, his ships badly needed repair and he was relieved of his command before he could see to his ships or secure the extra forces he required.
1805 – Master Betty (William Betty) played Hamlet on the London stage, aged just 14. He was such a success that the House of Commons was adjourned to enable members to watch his performance. His success was short-lived and, not long afterwards, he was hissed off the stage.
1864 – English explorer Samuel Baker was the first European to see the lake he named Lake Albert (located on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo) after the recently deceased Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria.
1885 – The Mikado, a light opera by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, had its first public performance in London.
1891 – HMTS Monarch laid a telephone cable along the English Channel bed to prepare for the first telephone links across the Channel. Monarch was launched in 1884, was the first cable ship designed specifically for the GPO and was fitted with three cable tanks, two forward and one aft.
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