Today in History - onthisday.com

 

                                                                    Sept 14

1741 George Frideric Handel finishes his "Messiah" oratorio after working on it nonstop for 24 days

1752 Britain and the British Empire, including the American colonies, adopt the Gregorian Calendar after skipping 11 days between September 3 and September 13 

1814 Francis Scott Key pens the poem "Defence of Fort M'Henry," later known as "The Star-Spangled Banner," while witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry from a ship in Baltimore Harbor

1914 Lord Kitchener: "Your Country Needs You" appears as the front cover design for London Opinion magazine

1922 Burning of Smyrna, the Asia Minor Catastrophe to Greeks: Ottoman army expels Greeks and other non-Turks from Asia Minor, destroying much of the port city of Smyrna (August 13 OS) 

1923 Jack Dempsey recovers after being knocked through the ropes in the first round to knock out Argentine challenger Luis Firpo in the second round in front of more than 80,000 at the Polo Grounds in NYC

1936 First prefrontal lobotomy in America performed by Walter Freeman and James W. Watts at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

1939 World's first practical helicopter, the VS-300, designed by Igor Sikorsky, takes a short tethered flight in Stratford, Connecticut 

1949 India's Constituent Assembly adopts Hindi as an official language, celebrated today as Hindi Day

1956 IBM introduces the RAMAC 305, the first commercial computer with a hard drive featuring magnetic disk storage, which weighs over a ton 

1960 Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela form the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) 

1982  Two famous American women – Grace Kelly and Isadora Duncan, both died after tragic motoring accidents in the same area on this day, though half a century apart.

1985 "The Golden Girls," starring Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty, debuts on NBC

1987 Cal Ripken Jr.'s record streak of 8,243 consecutive innings (908 games) is finally broken

2020 Astronomers report a possible sign of life on Venus after detecting phosphine in the planet's atmosphere through a telescope 

2021 One in 500 Americans has died of COVID-19 as the nation's known death toll reaches 663,913 (Johns Hopkins)