#TodayInHistory – March 27
4 min read
March 27 – Some Important Events on this day
1513 👉🏼 Spaniard Juan Ponce de León and his expedition first sight Florida.
The explorer first arrived in the Caribbean with Columbus’ 2nd voyage in 1493. In 1502 he served under the new governor of Hispaniola, Nicolás de Ovando and was involved with the massacre of the local population of Taínos. Later he became the governor of the eastern part of Hispaniola. In 1508 he founded the first European settlement in Puerto Rico, Camparra.
Eventually, in 1513 with a royal contract he was the first known European to discover Florida, which he named. A popular myth asserts that another part of his exploration was a search for the ‘fountain of youth’.
1625 👉🏼 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland ascends the English throne.
Why famous? Lost the English Civil War, executed in Whitehall, London – but wore an extra shirt because he did not want shivers due to the cold to be misinterpreted as fear…
1814 👉🏼 Battle at Horseshoe Bend: General Andrew Jackson defeats the Red Sticks, part of the Creek Indian tribe near Dadeville, Alabama
1855 👉🏼 Physician and geologist Abraham Gesner patents kerosene
1887 👉🏼 Prince Albert Memorial’s architect died on this day
✔️ Read the article!
1914 👉🏼 1st successful non-direct blood transfusion is performed by Dr. Albert Hustin in Brussels 🩸
1915 👉🏼 Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary, is arrested and returned to quarantine on North Brother Island, New York after spending five years evading health authorities and causing several further outbreaks of typhoid.
Typhoid Mary was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. As a carrier with no symptoms she was the cause of several typhoid outbreaks in the New York area. Born Mary Mallon, she was an Irish immigrant working as a domestic cook, and typhoid outbreaks followed her from job to job. She infected at least 53 people, mostly the families she worked for and their staff. The actual number of people she infected is likely much higher as Mary changed both her name and jobs to hide from officials.
As the first known “healthy carrier” of typhoid fever, Mary did not understand how she could spread the disease and so resisted all attempts to detain her. In any case, she had a poor understanding of hygiene and disease transmission.
Although she never broke any laws, Mary was subjected to a trial and twice forcibly isolated by public health authorities (1907-1910 and 1915-1938), and lived nearly thirty years in isolation.
Her name has become a popular term for anyone unwittingly passing on an undesirable illness.
1941 👉🏼 Adolf Hitler signs Directive 27 (assault on Yugoslavia)
1952 👉🏼 “Singin’ in the Rain”, musical comedy directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, starring Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, premieres at Radio City Music Hall in NYC 🎶
1958 👉🏼 Nikita Khrushchev becomes Soviet Premier as well as First Secretary of the Communist Party
1964 👉🏼 The Great Alaska Earthquake (9.2 magnitude) and resulting tsunami kill 139 people in the largest US earthquake and second largest ever recorded.
At 5:36 p.m. this day—Good Friday—the earth trembled just as many Alaskans were sitting down to dinner. Eyewitnesses described hearing a crunching, grinding noise as the earth shook.
The violent shaking led to water, sewer and gas line breaks and widespread telephone and electrical failures. It effortlessly toppled telephone poles, buckled railroad tracks, split roads in half, uprooted buildings, cars and docks and tore homes apart, even though the worst was yet to come. The earthquake triggered a swell of devastating tsunamis, landslides and submarine slumps which caused massive property damage and loss of life.
1977 👉🏼 583 die in aviation’s worst ever disaster when two Boeing 747s collide at Tenerife airport in Spain.
The Tenerife airport crash at Los Rodeos Airport is the world’s deadliest aviation accident with the loss of 583 lives.
A number of factors contributed to the disaster; a terror incident at nearby Gran Canaria airport had diverted a number of planes to Los Rodeos and fog was obscuring visibility. In these conditions Dutch aircraft KLM Flight 4805 began its take off, not realising Pan Am Flight 1736 was still on the runway. The two planes caught fire and only 61 people from the Pam Am flight survived.
1995 👉🏼 “Back for Good” single released by British boy Band Take That, reaches No. 1 in 31 countries 🎵
2009 👉🏼 Situ Gintung, an artificial lake in Indonesia, fails killing at least 99 people.
2134 👉🏼 32nd predicted perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet ☄️