In 1931 on this day "The Star-Spangled Banner" became the official national anthem of the United States.
Written by Francis Scott Key toward the end of the War of 1812 he put his poem to music, the song "To Anacreon in Heaven", a barroom song. "The Star-Spangled Banner" competed with "My Country 'Tis of Thee" and "Hail Columbia" for ceremonial uses.
The U.S. Navy was the first to adopt "The Star-Spangled Banner" officially in 1889. The White House recognized it in 1916 and in 1931 Congress made it official.

Time magazine, first published on this date in 1923. Weekly news magazine, the first of its kind in this country.
Founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, who had worked together on the Yale Daily News. They started with a subscription list of 9,000 readers.

It was on this date in 1899 the German pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer got a patent for Aspirin. It was a synthetic version of a drug that had been used by the Sumerians and the Egyptians as early as 3000 BC.
The Greek physician Hippocrates reported giving willow leaf tea to women in the throes of childbirth to help ease their labor pains.

It was on this date in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell got his patent for what became known as "the telephone." He tried to sell the patent to Western Union; they were not interested, and so he started the Bell Telephone Company.
Even though he found the telephone annoying and refused to ever have a telephone installed in his home. And four years later (1880) Bell filed a patent for a "photophone", a wireless device in which the speakers could see each other as they talked.
Picture of the first telephone
More information about Bell's Photophone

In 1818 on this day the novel "Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus" was published, by 21-year-old Mary Shelley.
The story of the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the creature that he forged from the spare parts of corpses. A book now considered a modern classic, and considered the very first science fiction novel.
(It was first published anonymously, but quickly became a sensation, and when 21-year-old Mary Shelley stepped forward as the author, many were doubtful that such a young woman could have crafted the deeply complex and intriguing story of creation, ethics, and philosophy.)

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on March 12th, 1922. Because his parents were both descendants of French-Canadian immigrants, his family spoke a French dialect called Joual at home and therefore he spoke no English until he was about six years old. Life in Lowell was not easy during Jack's childhood. While it had once been an important industrial town, businesses were on the decline and the Great Depression hit Lowell's economy hard. Many families, including the Kerouacs, had trouble making ends meet.
From a very early age on, Jack was very creative and artistic. In high school, Jack became a local football star. He was so talented that he won a scholarship for a college education at Columbia. In 1940, Jack went to Columbia to begin playing football, but broke his leg early in the season.
Jack then got a job as the sports reporter for the Lowell Sun, where he worked for several months. The United States was just entering into World War II, and Jack decided to join a ship as a sailor in the Merchant Marine in early 1942, but was honorably discharged a few months later on psychological grounds.
In 1949, Jack took a road trip from the East Coast to San Francisco and he would cross America and Mexico several times in the next decade. These cross-country trips are the background for Jack's most famous work, On the Road.
Jack Kerouac died in 1969.

And it was on this date in 1781 an English astronomer, Sir William Herschel, discovered the planet Uranus.
Other people had seen it, but he was the first one to figure out that it was a planet and not a star. And he could see that it was very far from the Sun, farther even than Saturn, the farthest known planet at that time.
Over the years, astronomers have discovered 27 moons orbiting the planet, which is named for the Greek god of the sky, Ouranos.

The Ides of March - the day on which Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by conspirators in 44 B.C. He'd been at odds with the Roman Senate. The Senate felt that Caesar was a threat to the Republic, that he had tyrannical leanings. And so the senators Brutus and Cassius formed a group called the Liberators, who met to conspire against Caesar.
They considered several assassination ideas and finally decided to attack him at a meeting of the Senate in the Theatre of Pompey, where only senators were allowed to be present and knives could easily be concealed under their togas.
In the days before, a number of people had warned Caesar not to go to that meeting of the Senate. His wife Calpurnia begged him not to go, she'd had a dream about it. But Brutus, one of the conspirators, convinced Caesar that it would be unmanly to listen to gossip and the pleadings of a woman.
According to Plutarch's account, Caesar passed a seer on the way, who had told Caesar that harm would come to him on the ides of March. Caesar saw the seer and said, "The ides of March have come." The seer said, "Yes, Caesar; but they are not gone yet." And when he arrives at the Senate he was set upon by Brutus and Cassius, who stabbed him dozens of times and left him to bleed to death.
The assassination was meant to save the Republic, but it actually resulted in the downfall of the Republic, sparked a series of civil wars and led to Octavian, becoming Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor. The very thing that the conspirators had feared.

St. Patrick’s Day, the feast day celebrating the patron saint of Ireland, St. Patrick, born in Wales.
He was 16, when a group of Irish pirates came to the village and took some of the young men, including him, back to Ireland as slaves. He worked for six years as a herdsman, then escaped and went back to Wales.
But he heard a voice telling him to go back to Ireland and convert the Irish to Christianity, which is what he did, after spending 12 years in France. He went to Ireland, where he founded monasteries, schools, and churches.

John Updike was born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, PA. He lived on an isolated farm during his childhood and dreamed to escape from this farm.
Updike's mother had literary aspirations of her own, and therefore books were large part of Updike's early life.
After high school in Shillingtown, where his father worked as a science teacher, Updike attended Harvard and graduated with highest honors.
In 1954 he traveled to England, In England he met Catherine White, who offered him a staff position at the New Yorker Magazine. Within two years Updike decided to leave the New Yorker and to concentrate on his poetry and fiction.
Updike was awarded a Pulizer Prize in 1982 for "Rabbit Is Rich" and another Pulizer Prize in 1990 for "Rabbit at Rest."
He lives in Beverly Farms, MA with is wife.
(Updike died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009.)

Irving Wallace was born on March 19, 1916 in Chicago. Both of his parents were born in Russia and had emigrated to the United States in their teens.
Wallace grew up in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He attended Williams Institute, Berkeley, California, and Los Angeles City College. He started his career as a journalist at the age of fifteen, when his early texts appeared in newspapers and magazines.
His breakthrough as a novelist came with "The Chapman Report" in 1960. A screen adaptation of the book was made in 1962. After "The Chapman Report", Wallace published mostly popular novels, several of which have been made into films. Although Wallace was often scorned by serious critics, his 16 novels and 17 nonfiction works sold some 250 million copies around the world.
Wallace died of cancer on June 29, 1990 in Los Angeles.

It was on this day in 1916 that Albert Einstein published his theory of general relativity. A principal important to know.
For example, GPS satellites need to take into account imperceptible changes in time described by relativity — just a few microseconds — due to their high speed. If they did not do it, they would be off in their distance calculations by several miles after only a day.
When Einstein was asked what he would have done if his theory of general relativity had not held up, he replied, "Then I would have been sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct."

Frank Sargeson was born as Norris Davey in Hamilton, New Zealand, on March 23, 1903, of conservative, puritanical, Methodist parents. After leaving school he took a job in a law office and began studying law.
After a row with his mother (she had learnt that he had made a sexual joke in a letter), he went to Auckland and then to London in 1927.
On his return in 1928 (now calling himself Frank), he got a job with the Public Trust in Wellington. It was also about this time that he started writing in earnest.
After being arrested for homosexual practices Frank went to stay with his much-loved uncle Oakley Sargeson at Okahukura near Taumarunui. Two years later, forced off his uncle's farm by the Depression, he emerged as Frank Sargeson, writer of stories.
In May 1931 he moved to the family house in Takapuna which was then a northern suburb of Auckland. And there he spent the rest of his life.
Like Katherine Mansfield, Sargeson helped to put New Zealand literature on the world map and his role is enormous also as a promoter and encourager of other talents.
He died on March 1, 1982.

It was on this day in 1882 the early microbiologist Robert Koch announced that he had found the bacterium responsible for tuberculosis. A disease that at the time of his discovery killed off one in seven people. It was believed to be an inherited condition, but Koch believed that it was a contagious illness.
He had already done work in bacteriology; he had identified the bacteria responsible for cholera and anthrax.
And eventually he isolated the cause of tuberculosis and delivered his results to a crowd of scientists in a lecture hall. He brought his entire laboratory to the room to replicate his method on the spot, and the room was left stunned by his work. There were no questions at the end; instead, the scientists all lined up to see the bacteria for themselves through the microscope.
Paul Erlich, a chemist, called the lecture "the most important experience of my scientific life."
Koch got the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1905 for his work with tuberculosis, which today thanks to antibiotics the death rate hovers at less than four percent.

Tennessee Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911.
In 1929, he entered the University of Missouri. He was not a successful student, and in 1931 he began work for a St. Louis shoe company. Six years later his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced in Memphis; in many respects this was the true beginning of his literary and stage career. He then studied at the University of Iowa.
In 1945, The Glass Menagerie, what many consider to be his finest play, had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later burst its way onto Broadway.
Although his reputation on Broadway continued to rise, particularly upon receiving his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams reached a larger world-wide public in 1950 when The Glass Menagerie, and again in 1951 when A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. Williams had now achieved a fame few playwrights of his day could equal.
From then on Williams divided his time between homes in Key West, New Orleans, and New York.
Williams struggled with depression throughout most of his life and especially after the death of his long-time friend in 1963. In 1969 he spent two months on a program, designed to free him from prolonged dependency on alcohol, amphetamines, and barbiturates.
In the early 1970s, Williams regained some measure of control in his personal life. In the 1980s Williams gained huge fame in the Soviet Union - he was called ''the biggest success since Chekhov."
Williams died on February 24, 1983 in New York City.

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. When Frost was two years old, his mother fled to Lawrence, Massachusetts, to get away from her husband, who was a drunkard. Frost became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, but never earned a formal degree.
His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published in 1894.
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America.
Frost participated in the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 by reciting a poems. Yet because the sun and the wind prevented him from reading his new poem, 'The Preface', Frost recited his old poem, 'The Gift Outright', from memory.
Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont. He died on January 29, 1963, in Boston.